


The Glass Factory

by PartlyCloudySkies



Category: Night In The Woods (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternative Universe - Art Center, Eventual MaeBea, Multi, Slice of Life, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-11
Updated: 2019-01-27
Packaged: 2019-02-13 09:14:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 81,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12980895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PartlyCloudySkies/pseuds/PartlyCloudySkies
Summary: For years, Old Harbor was the wrong side of the river; it was the place you go when you don't have what it takes to make it in Bright Harbor.A story of two women, their friends, and the doom that awaits them.





	1. The Chamber of the Black Goat

**Author's Note:**

> i have a [tumblr](https://eldritchgarboandcosmicmalloy.tumblr.com) where i post updates about the story and you can send me questions, if you are feeling it.

The first day of Bea’s new job started before the sunrise as she rang the buzzer at the employee’s entrance of the Glass Factory Art Center.

No. That wasn’t quite true. The first day of Bea’s new job started at 4 AM, when she woke up on a couch to the shrill beep of her phone’s alarm. Then she sat up in the couch she had been sleeping on the past month, groggy and full of dread and existential misery, static clinging to her sleep clothes with a crackle like a dead radio station. She stared at the far wall as if it might offer some answer as to how she got to where she was and how she might get out of it. It was a lot to ask of a wall and frankly, it was unfair of Bea to expect an answer.

She stood, walked across the front room and, with as much quiet as she could manage, let herself into Jackie’s room where the bathroom was. There, she shut the door and prepared herself. Toilet. Toothbrush. A sink full of cold water splashed into her face. She looked at herself in the mirror. She was tall enough she had to crouch a bit to fit her reflection in it. Her long, black hair fell over her face. She reached up, brushed a comb through it swiftly and affixed her hair into three buns down the back of her head. Now she could see her face and oh jeez. She wiped away the sleep drool encrusted on the corner of her mouth and rubbed at the bags under her blue-gray eyes. No helping that. Her mouth was pulled into a frown that was probably permanent at this point and accentuated her already-long face. She tried not to spend too much time being critical at her reflection. Nose too long and blah blah blah. Not like she hadn’t had these thoughts every day since, like, puberty. She unfolded her work clothes. Black. Like her sleep clothes. She wore black because it went well with her olive skin, she told herself. Not because she still clung to a goth phase human decency demanded she give up when high school ended years ago. No. Not at all.

About half an hour later, she silently let herself out of Jackie’s apartment. Jackie was still asleep and would likely resent Bea forever if she dared to wake her at this kind of hour. The pre-dawn was dark, punctuated by islands of light from lampposts and the windows of other early risers. She hunched in on herself against the October cold, lit a cigarette just to have a little fire near her face. Tobacco smoke and the mist of her own breath indistinguishable from one another. Under her boots, Bea felt the bricks of the sidewalk, the cracked ones, the ones that shifted under her feet, loose from their mortar. The disrepair of age and neglect.

If Jackie were out here she’d rage at the injustice of it all. The lack of infrastructure development and the public housing shortages. It was all very noble and made Bea feel a little guilty when she took comfort in the decrepit atmosphere of Old Harbor. Bea loved that the place was, well, spooky. The way the misshapen old buildings caught the streetlight illumination in odd angle that cast fractured shadows. The way soft mist rolled in from the river, channeled through narrow alleys. The way that the slump and slide of the marshy earth underneath the town had caused the streets to warp in odd ways and how she could feel the rise and depression of that warp under her thick black boots.

Old Harbor was… well, it was old by American standards. Every once in a while Bea would pass by a hunched brick building that had a little bronze plaque that advertised its colonial significance. Magistrate so-and-so had his house here, revolutionary soldiers billeted in this place, yadda yadda. Whatever heights it attained in its past, Old Harbor was now at the bottom of a long fall. Across the river and occasionally visible down streets and alleyways Bea walked past, was the glittering galaxy of Bright Harbor. Skyscrapers and massive LED billboards and neon signs looming over the pedestrians who teemed even at this early time. The city that’s always awake, or something like that. Old Harbor was where you went when you got washed out of Bright Harbor because you were too old, too poor, too set in all the wrong ways, too out of touch, too far beyond hope. You took the ferry as if you were crossing into the afterlife and you took up residence in the squat, leaning, mean little boltholes of Old Harbor. Not that Bright Harbor was some paradise. The people who made it there didn’t make it by playing nice. But from their side of the river they could look across the way at the black expanse where Old Harbor lurked and tell themselves that they were at least a better brand of scum than the sad sacks who lived _there_.

The smarter ones looked at Old Harbor with market realities in their heads; property values and rent hikes and eviction notices. Harbingers of the new wave of gentrification had already taken root. One herbal tea shop now would become a boutique gallery, then a national chain. Cheap apartments give way to row houses to luxury condos. Bright Harbor invading Old Harbor and once again the people who couldn’t make it get pushed out like debris tossed by storms.

Bea took a long drag of her cigarette and cleared her head. She really spent too much time with Jackie if this was the kind of stuff that occupied her head at five in the morning on her way to her first day on the job. It didn’t help that she was working in ground zero of Old Harbor’s redevelopment.

The Glass Factory Center for the Arts was right on the shore. It was an imposing building and on its land-facing side it rose up above the others. Its riverside projected an array of docks that extended out over the water. Upscale seafood restaurants were anchored all around. Lashed to the docks were yachts and tour boats that bobbed in the black river. Bea walked past them, listening to the waves lap at their hulls as she rounded the building to find the the employee entrance. The door was next to the Glass Factory’s in-house cafe. She snuffed out her cigarette and knocked at the glass. Eventually some guy she supposed was opening the cafe weaved around the counter, looked at her from the other side of the door and mouthed “we’re closed” at her.

Bea cursed, a puff of fog expelling from her mouth. _Right, right. Have your employee ID visible at all times_ the orientation video had told her. To her mild shame she had paid rapt attention to it. More attention than a wildly outdated video shot with 90’s-era nauseating camera angles really deserved. The kind of attention she paid to videos when she was an elementary schooler watching cartoony safety shorts warning her of stranger danger. Charity Bearity: Stick With Familiarity!

Well, being desperate for a job can make a person do awful things. Bea pulled her freshly laminated ID card out of her jacket’s inside pocket. _Beatrice Santellow_ , it read. She hadn’t noticed the typo until after she left orientation. Underneath her name: Maintenance. She was intolerably fond of how slick and new it looked. The barista nodded and opened the door to let her in. Bea offered a muted thanks but he was already walking back to the cafe. Bea closed the door behind her.

The Glass Factory was a massive structure. True to its name, the place was once an actual factory that made glass back when Old Harbor was an industrial port where manufactured products were loaded onto barges that took to the river to Bright Harbor and places beyond. The exterior, once grimy and fire-scorched brick, had been rehabilitated and cleaned up. New brick now, bright adobe earth tones with orange designs that accented the facade. Inside it was three stories and rectangular. The two levels above Bea were mezzanines with sleek glass and metal railing that circumscribed the interior of the building. They and the ground floor were dotted with little studios separated from one another by partitions of sheet metal and transparent plastic. Each studio played host to artists, some of the spaces shared, others were solo. In the dimness of the pre-opening hours, Bea could not make much of the art exhibits beyond the shapes of portraits and contrasting colors. For a moment she basked in that weird, private feeling. It was like being in a museum after hours. A place that was huge and yet comfortingly intimate. An empty space that wrapped itself around her.

The restive silence was pierced by a sharp _ding!_ and the metal-on-metal gliding sound of elevator doors opening. A rectangle of light opened at to Bea’s right and out of it spilled a tangle of machine and man.

“Come on, get out here you rusty old piece of crap.” The man’s voice was scratchy with the wear of years and the exertion of wrestling his contraption — a dented, worn-out floor polisher that had long lost its luster and currently had its wheels snarled up in its own power cable — out of the elevator. Eventually he dragged it out forcibly to the screeching protests of wheels that were not turning. The sound echoed. The silence was now a fond memory.

He was tall with a wiry gray goatee on his weathered, tanned face. His red, grease-stained plaid shirt under frayed denim overalls was almost too perfect an image: the universal “I fix things and don’t much care how I look while doing it” look that Bea had pretty much grown up with. It was almost certain that this was the person she should be talking to.

The sound of her hard boots on tile floor was lost in the din of the man wrestling with his machine. “Excuse me,” she said as she came up.

The man turned on her, his head swiveling round first followed by the rest of his body by degrees. It was uncanny and bird-like and as if to cement the impression he leaned in and stared at her with big eyes like a barn owl looking at a field mouse. “For crying out loud. You just about gave me a damn heart attack there.”

“Sorry,” Bea said. “I’m Beatrice Santello. I was hired to be part of the maintenance team?”

“You don’t say.” He squinted at her. “You got much experience? Maintaining things?”

“Before this I worked at a hardware store for six years. I did a lot of house calls.” She said, quoting her job application. It was better than saying _“No, asshole, I was interviewed and accepted without anyone ever bothering to ask me if I can fix machines.”_ Patience and an attempt at a good first impression now, antagonistic sarcasm later and if it’s warranted. It was a thing that had taken Bea a little while to learn.

“Guess that qualifies,” said the man. “The superintendent did say she was bringing on a new hire.”

“That’s me. And you are mister…”

“Oh. Yeah. I’m the Janitor.”

“Mister Janitor,” Bea said with a flat voice.

“Just the Janitor.” He turned away from her and grunted as he squatted down to untangle the power cable from the floor polisher’s wheels. “It’s what everyone calls me. Ain’t been no one bothering to learn my name. And I never bothered telling them.”

“Okay, well, I’m asking now.”

“You’ll be needing a tour of the place I suppose. Unless they already did that with you.”

Bea frowned at her unanswered question but didn’t elect to make a thing of it. His ID was no help either. It hung loosely from an alligator clip on his shirt pocket and was scratched, torn, actually scorched and bent up to the point of illegibility. “The superintendent walked me around,” she said.

“Hah!” The Janitor stood back up, knees and elbows and back popping audibly as he did. “Oof. She don’t know this place like I do. Got about a solid hour before we open up. As good a time as any.” He pushed the polisher against the wall and gestured at Bea. “Let’s take a quick look around.”

Bea followed, her long gait easily matching his so they were side-by-side. “So, uh, this ‘janitor’ thing. I applied for maintenance work, not to, like, no offense, clean messes and take out trash.”

The Janitor gave her a sideways look. “Oh, there’ll be messes. And you’ll be cleaning them up. But don’t you worry. That ain’t your focus. Truth be told, you’ll be spending most of your time keeping this place from falling apart.”

Bea raised one neat eyebrow in a sharp, practiced arch. “Really.”

“Really.”

She looked around them. The studios were all in neat rows. The metal partitions had a burnished texture to them that gleamed oily in the low light. The clear plastic windows that gave an unimpeded view into the studios were probably in need of a wipe-down, but nothing outrageously gross. They walked on polished concrete that gleamed with little shards of dark mica. It was not the kind of place that Bea would assume, on first glance, was in danger of falling apart.

“Seems nice enough,” she said cautiously.

“Oh it’s pretty alright if you’re just looking at the surface of it,” said the Janitor. “But you got to remember this place had a life before it was all renovated into a fancy art… thing.”

“Yeah, I’ve read the pamphlets,” said Beatrice Santello, who earnestly read tourism pamphlets for their educational value. “Actual glass factory, shut down during some recession or other, rotted for a while when manufacturing left town, revitalized through a combination of public and private grants to be an art center.”

“Well it might be an art center at first blush, what with studios and, and, exhibits.” The Janitor waved one arm in an airy gesture. “But it’s still an old factory down at its bones. What that means is all its guts, your ventilation, your heating, your water, your electricity… is basically a hundred years old. There’d been some updates, sure. But if anything that makes it more ornery. You got your old stuff mixed in with new stuff and the building’s throwing constant hissy fits about it, believe you me. What it comes to, uh, Beatrice, is you’ll be putting out fires pretty much constantly.”

“As long as they’re not actual fires, ha ha,” Bea said. It was meant to be a joke, but the Janitor gave her a level look that made her wish she had kind of not said anything at all.

“Mmhmm,” he said.

Paradoxically all this came as something of a relief to Bea. At least her job sounded like it would keep her busy. Chew up her time and keep her mind off… stuff. She was at a point where she could use a little bit of that. Oh hey, and bonus: she gets paid too. Barely enough keep her above subsistence poverty in a miserable apartment that will keep her sheltered until it inevitably gets demolished as part of Old Harbor’s redevelopment, but live for today!

“You got any tools?” said the Janitor.

“Yeah. I’ve got a full set.” Cleaned and sorted according to a system Bea had come up with on her own. Her toolbox may be a constant reminder of everything wrong with her life, but by god it was a well-maintained reminder. “I didn’t bring it with me, wasn’t sure if I was supposed to use my own or…”

“We’ve got a sub-basement with everything in it but it never hurts to bring your own. Just keep an eye on them.”

Bea was well aware of the phenomenon of handymen completely disregarding property rights when it came to tools of the trade. “Right.”

“Still, we’re pretty well stocked,” said the Janitor. “Probably won’t need to bring your own. Leastways not when you’re dealing with the Black Goat.”

“The Black Goat,” Bea said. It wasn’t a question. It wasn’t a request for clarification. It was just Bea repeating the last three words that had been said to her because they were nonsensical in this context so her brain rebelled at having to absorb them and instead pushed them out of her mouth in hopes of never having to deal with them again.

“Hoo yeah, the Black Goat. I better show you while we still got some time before opening.”

“Livestock was definitely not in the job description.”

The Janitor either did not hear or elected to ignore her. Instead he stepped out ahead and veered towards a polished counter where, during opening hours, a volunteer would stand to answer questions from visitors. Behind the counter was a metal door with a crash bar and a prominent “EMPLOYEES ONLY” sign. He pushed it open and Bea followed.

The wall between where the art center ended and where the ancient glass factory began was really quite thin. Walking through the door had an almost looking glass effect. Gone was the burnished metal and polished floors and diode lighting. They were in a corridor that was water-stained cinder blocks, flickering industrial cage lights and the dull roar of air pushed through rattling ducts and water hammering through heavy pipes. Bea felt the grit of cracked concrete under her boots. On the far wall was faded lettering, rust-red and flaking near to the point of illegibility, but she could make out “BOILER ROOM” and an arrow pointing down the corridor.

Bea could smell the river in here, something that until now she realized was conspicuously absent from the rest of the building. Honestly, it was probably just water damage and mildew; concrete did so poorly in wet environments. Still. She felt closer to the river here than she did a few feet away on the opposite side of the wall. Which was true in a literal sense but there was something more to it if she were willing to concede an inch to poetic license. But Bea was never one to cut anyone any slack. Especially herself. Instead she gave the place a critical eye, noted mold damage and spider web cracks. There was a budget involved in rehabilitating the glass factory and it definitely reached its limit around about here.

They walked for some time and went down a stairwell that suggested they were in the basement. Then the Janitor stopped at an intersection. From what Bea could tell, the entire art center had maintenance corridors layered like an ant farm sandwiched between the interior and exterior. She did have the sense earlier that the inside seemed more cramped than the outside would have suggested. It was an unnerving place to be, hard to envision that just on the other side was a studio for some nice person who wanted to display watercolors of their dog in a public space. The juxtaposition with this dark catacomb corridor was so jarring and uncanny that Bea was willing to give even odds that the Janitor would soon turn around wearing a ritual mask while holding up a sacrificial dagger. Instead, he stepped through a passage and flicked a switch that went off with an audible _thunk_. Yellow tungsten light filled a large chamber ahead. Bea followed him in.

The odds of her being led into some secret sacrificial cult had, in her estimation, been bumped up from even to three out of four chances.

“Watch your step here, there’s a bit of a drop,” said the Janitor.

Where the concrete walls were exposed the light reflected off them as a gloomy yellow-orange. Everything else, though, was black. A network of wrought-iron pipes that embedded themselves into the walls and ceiling like creeper vines corkscrewed crazily over one another like a baroque spider’s web into a central point at the far side of the room. That central point was a massive black machine like Bea had never seen, an amalgam of lumpen cast iron chambers with pressure valves hissing and ticking at seemingly random places. Pipes crawled over its surface like a Geigeresque nightmare and where they attached themselves to the chambers signs of water corrosion and a faint hissing noise made Bea want to back off as if she had stumbled onto a snake den. The metal monstrosity was slightly more than twice her height and that wasn’t including the part of the machine that was underneath the floor level, as the room had dipped down into a depression where the machine was installed. An uncomfortable moist heat radiated from the surface that felt like a pressure pushing Bea out of the room. She was, frankly, inclined to take the hint.

“This here’s the Black Goat,” said the Janitor. He hooked his thumbs around his overalls as if he were showing off his prize pig at a county fair. “A real piece of work, ain’t it?”

“What the hell is it for?” said Bea. Aside from proving that one could, in fact, design a machine that can serve no other purpose than inhabiting nightmares.

“It’s a boiler. For the whole damn building.”

“ _That’s_ a boiler?” It looked like a grisly trophy taken from some ancient and terrible locomotive monster; an Industrial Revolution heart raging in place, chained and straining.

The Janitor cackled, high, reedy, crow-like. Then he broke into a cough and held his hand up to indicate he needed a moment.

“You okay?” said Bea.

“Just a minu —” He brought his fist up to his mouth and hacked into it with a phlegmy cough.

“I have cough drops.”

“No…”

“Do you need water?”

“Just gimme…” After another fit wracked him and he bent spasmodically. “… A moment.” That was the worst of it. He stood up as it seemed to pass. “Whoo,” he said, taking a deep breath.

Bea gave him a sidelong look and raised her eyebrow.

“Yeah, that’s the boiler,” he said.

Overriding misgivings, Bea stepped down into what turned out not to be a cult’s secret abattoir, but the boiler room. Stepping over a few pipes for a closer look, she determined that the boiler’s misshapen form was largely due to… well, age. It was ancient and dented. Someone must have taken a sledgehammer to it at some point in its life but the damage looked so old that it probably outlived its attacker. But beyond that, Bea saw substantial weld marks like stitches in a pulp art of Frankenstein’s monster. It seemed to be several boilers welded into one utilities-based abomination. And it was thoroughly enmeshed into the concrete because apparently someone decided that, hey, building codes and safety guidelines haven’t been invented yet so why not just be completely insane?

Bea looked for a manufacturer’s seal or a model number. She recognized the futility of it, but since 90% of her previous job consisted of finding a model number, plugging it into a manufacturer’s website and ordering the appropriate part online, it was pretty much an ingrained act. And a fruitless one. The boiler was so pitted with age that even if she did find it she wouldn’t be able to tell the raised numbers from the knots of gnarled metal that covered the surface.

She did find the black goat that apparently gave the boiler its name. An ornate bas-relief set at eye level on a part of the boiler free of pipe attachments. It was oddly well-defined on the cratered surface. A goat, possibly prancing if goats could prance. Bea didn’t know. Animal husbandry being a field of study utterly tangential to her life. Whatever the hell it was doing, it was doing it. On the boiler. Black goat.

“You came on board right at the start of the cold season,” the Janitor said. “Either the perfect time or the worst time, depending who you ask, haw haw! This old girl puts her work in when it’s cold and it’s up to us to keep it from blowing the whole place sky high.”

“That’s not a thing that could actually happen, is it?” said Bea.

The Janitor ignored her, took a wrench from his work belt and struck the boiler. It made a sound like Tolmetron signaling the end of the world. Deep and resonating and with a rumble that Bea almost believed she could feel in her bones. The boiler gurgled in what sounded for all the world like a threat. 

“She was made back when safety weren’t much of a watchword,” said the Janitor. “Old even back when the factory was young. Got bits and pieces added on over time, too. Don’t bother looking for a serial number or the like. Not even sure who made it. We need a part replaced? Gotta get it custom made.”

“Sounds like a lot of trouble,” said Bea. “Why not just tear it out and put in a modern one?”

“Oh, all kinds of reasons that boils down to money. They’d have to replace the whole water and heating system and shut the place down for a good long while. Rip out a big chunk of floor and wall. Easier and cheaper to pay a wrench monkey or two like us to keep her running.” He put his hands in his pockets causing the tools hooked to his overalls to clang against one another. “Not the worst gig, if you ask me.”

“No, I suppose not,” Bea said absently as she came nearer to the boiler. She felt the heat come off of it. Not so awful now that she had time to adjust, but enough that she knew touching it probably wouldn’t be a great idea.

“You’ll be making regular stops here. There’s stuff you should do over the course of the day to keep her ticking over properly,” said the Janitor. “I’ll show you.”

What followed was — Bea was certain of this — a classic case of a cargo cult. The Janitor fiddled with the pressure gauges, knocking on them with his wrench. He wrapped his hands around the hem of his shirt to insulate them from the heat and then grabbed one of the pipes and gave it a firm shake. He opened and closed a valve hatch — several times — for no discernible reason. Then he twisted a rusting handle that squeaked in its fixture, letting out a long gout of steam that nearly singed his face and forced Bea to take a step back. And once he had done all that, he swore with an earnest seriousness that all this was necessary to keep the Black Goat satisfied.

“And you do this every day?” Bea said.

“Every four hours,” the Janitor corrected. “You’ll be doing it too.”

Bea let a long pause linger between them. “Really,” she said with a leaden voice.

“Yup.”

_It’s a paycheck it’s a paycheck it’s a paycheck_. The litany ran through her mind and kept her from laughing in the man’s face. At the end of the day, if someone wanted to pay her to poke at an old piece of crap to no actual effect, then was she really in a place to object? Why no, no she was not.

“Alright,” she said. “Seems simple enough.”

“Yup. You’ll get the hang of her I’m sure.”

The rest of the tour was not nearly as weird. They navigated the narrow corridors, during which Bea confirmed they wrap around the whole building thanks to a series of stairwells that pass over the entryways. Bea could vanish down one door, walk the whole way around the building, then come out an opposite door with no one seeing her as if this were a haunted funhouse mansion with secret passages. All it really needed were strategic peepholes cut into some of the portraits hung as exhibits. A tiny part of Bea, the part that was still eight years old, really liked that idea.

Beyond that, the job was basically running around and fixing things. The Glass Factory was a half-finished renovation that needed constant upkeep. The artists weren’t much help either. They needed power and a computer network. Those artists who used aerosols, air brushes and other stuff that put things into the air that one would rather not breathe needed their ventilation in excellent working order. “And other stuff like that,” said the Janitor. “You’ll catch on over time.”

Then there was the more mundane stuff of keeping things clean and tidy and making sure that the mold and rot of the old glass factory didn’t encroach too far into the Glass Factory Center for the Arts. It was drudgery, but Bea could use a little drudgery. She spent four hours shadowing the Janitor, watching him move with the practiced confidence of someone who had been doing this job for quite a long time. Sometimes she got to hand him tools, but she was content watching and learning.

Several times he had to go down to the sub-basement where maintenance kept its tools. It was a tight space with chicken wire walls with cork board tiles tied to them, which in turn held tools. The place was dingy and cobwebby and there was a tiny television that looked like it came from the 80s nestled among the hammers and nails on a workbench. It was monochrome and tuned to a sports program. There was even a tiny fridge where she could store her lunch until break time. The cafe next to the employee entrance offered no discount for workers but Bea wasn’t intending to spend money if at all possible, discounted or no.

Bea spent her break down there, seated at a workbench with a small bag of chips and bottled water she got out from vending machines back on the surface. She actually thought of the ground floor as “the surface,” like she was a dwarven delver from some hackneyed fantasy novel. Bea had to smile at that. Once her time was up, she was back to shadowing the Janitor.

Nearing the end of her first eight hours on her first day at the job, Bea felt like she was getting a handle on things. Walk around, listen for any sounds the building makes that don’t sound happy, respond to complaints and do the absurd thing with the boiler every four hours. So, baby the boiler when she clocked in in the morning, then in the middle of her day, the once more before she clocked out in the afternoon. She had done a great deal of walking and her feet ached but the day passed more or less easily. She had put herself on autopilot; just enough surface level cognition to learn the basics of her job while the rest of her thoughts were sequestered away in a hazy static where they could not bother her. It was a relief.

Once she had clocked out, she considered sticking around and absorbing the ambiance of the art center. The doors had long been open and the exhibits available. Visitors milled around the space. She passed a few studios close by. Little placards next to the studio entrances listed names and occupations. Some of the artists were freelancers who did well enough to afford space at the art center, others were retirees just looking for a hobby to spend money on. Others had day jobs, and those studios were empty save for afternoons or weekends. Most of the studios were leased out to art students at the local college. People Bea’s age, working in an environment where their passions could flourish. What a pleasant thought.

Bea’s mouth was drawn into a tight, straight line. Maybe it would be better to leave.

She breathed in the air as she walked back to Jackie’s apartment. The difference between Old Harbor before sunrise and Old Harbor now in the waning October noontime was jarring enough to have Bea craning her neck, looking around like some gormless tourist despite having seen the place for roundabout a month now. Signs of change were all around her. She walked past a block that was once occupied by an abandoned warehouse that abutted the river. Now demolished, the empty lot afforded a clear view to Bright Harbor. The fence delineating the lot had signs advertising the future luxury condo, inquire by email for vacancies. It was within blocks of Jackie’s place.

Once back at Jackie’s, hunger asserted itself. Bea bee-lined to the kitchen nook and opened the fridge. When it had become clear that she might become a more long-term informal roommate Jackie had told her that what was hers was now Bea’s.

Bea had hated the idea instantly.

Bad enough that she had latched on parasitically to her one friend in Old Harbor, even worse that she would take Jackie’s food too. Bea had been insistent that she buy her own food, over Jackie’s assertion that this was completely ridiculous and could be interpreted as some kind of passive-aggressive critique of her dietary habits. Bea could see where she was coming from but she also knew full well that this wasn’t a passive-aggressive anything, but in fact a very aggressive desire to exert some form of control over her life, even if that meant her corner of the fridge mainly consisted of a loaf of wheat bread and a jar of peanut butter.

Well, a person ought to be allowed to stick to her principles. And hey, she got a job. This called for a special gesture to mark the occasion. This peanut butter sandwich was going to have extra peanut butter.

Idly Bea wondered what depraved end such hedonism might have in store for her. Then it turned out a coughing fit was her divine punishment because apparently swallowing that much peanut butter without working her jaw on it was actually pretty damn tough. Chew. Drink some water. She was hungrier than she realized. She stood at the kitchen counter and leaned on it as she regarded the little sandwich. Clearly she had flown too close to the sun in her haste to celebrate.

After Bea cleared away the plate and cup, The apartment entrance’s lock rattled, then turned, then opened and in walked Jackie.

Bea nodded at her. “Hey.”

“Hey.”

Jackie was of average height and broad, her dark hair done up in twin buns above her pierced ears. Her face had a light dusting of acne and she wore big glasses that magnified her eyes, one of which had a microdermal piercing underneath it. Her brow was permanently creased as if all that fell within her vision met with her disapproval. Really though, it was just from her squinting so much before she got a proper prescription for her lenses.

“So how was your first day at the art center?” Jackie said. “Participating in the hell-grind of the rat race.”

“Considering it allows me to participate in paying my share of the rent, I tolerate it,” Bea said.

“Girl, I told you it’s okay not to pay. You’re getting back on your feet. I been there.”

“I’m sleeping under your roof and taking up space. Rent is expected,” Bea said firmly. It was an old argument and one that Bea was intent on winning. The prize for winning was giving up a significant chunk of her pay every month but again, Bea was nothing if not principled. “How was your day at work?”

Jackie trudged to the kitchen and rummaged through the cupboard. “Rough. Weather’s getting cold so we’re going all over the place looking for people to donate blankets or coats or whatever. Gonna see if we can stock the shelter up properly before the nights get really cold.”

“Sounds stressful,” said Bea. She could recognize that Jackie’s work at the shelter was noble, but would never be able to do it herself. It seemed emotionally draining and how Jackie coped she had no idea.

“You learn to deal. You learn to work with what you have. We’ll make it work somehow. They got a new pastor at the church who’s been really eager to coordinate with us.”

“Oh, cool.”

Jackie tutted over the fridge. “Incidentally, now that you’re paying rent that means you can end your weird self-imposed embargo on eating any food in here you didn’t buy. Cannot handle how serious you are about that.”

Bea straightened up self-righteously “I’m not going to —”

“Stop the self-flagellating and let yourself eat for god sakes. You work now.”

Bea let out a breath. “Yeah. Yeah, okay.”

“Thank you. I swear do you have any idea what it would look like to have a soup kitchen volunteer’s roommate faint from hunger? The goddamned scandal of it all.”

“The tragedy to have your image besmirched so,” said Bea.

“What do we have except for our image, after all?”

A wry smile crept over Bea’s face. She could almost bring herself to believe that Jackie truly wouldn’t mind Bea crashing on her couch indefinitely, but she had only been in Old Harbor a month and had a pretty good idea that this was not an arrangement that would end well for either of them if it kept going. The proverb about guests and fish and all that. Jackie was intense and Bea was stubborn and the two could only stay in close quarters together for so long. She would be eternally grateful to Jackie for giving her a place to stay after her arrival, but getting this job was only the first step in the vague, nebulous plan where Bea would somehow carve a life out for herself here. She remembered when she was younger. Back then she had a definite year-by-year plan of college, career, mortgage, marriage. These days she couldn’t decide if that was an actual good plan or just the imaginings of a simple youthful naif with no conception of the way the world worked. 

Either way, a dead parent was a pretty effective wrench in those particular cogs.

The smile fled and Bea scratched at the counter listlessly, feeling a sudden wave of awfulness. She had been told that time heals all wounds but it seemed to have skipped over hers. That was cool. Really cool.

“I think I’m going to stare at the wall for a little while. Then I’m going to go to sleep,” she said. “First day took a lot more out of me than I had thought.” This was true, at least partly; but she had hoped Jackie picked up on the general vibe of “I think I want to be alone and sad if you don’t mind.”

Jackie, bless her, seemed to do exactly that. She nodded and pushed away from the counter after pulling out a slice of cold leftover pizza from the fridge. “I’ll be in my room, holler if you want to hang.”

Bea sat in silence and stared at the wall, her chin in her hands, her elbows on the counter. She felt a pang in her gut when she caught a view of the world through the window. The sun was so low. She had spent so much of her day walking back and forth inside the guts of a building that couldn’t decide if it was old or new, obsolete or relevant. She was struck by how futile it was. How little it mattered. There she was, little Beatrice Santello _(Santellow)_ , scurrying around like a single ant in the maze of the colony. What did it matter if one building in one city had proper working ventilation or not? Was this what her life had come to? Oh, all those plans she once had. She was going to be a… what did she write on that silly little paper when she was in, god, 9th grade or something? The “Career Goals” paper. How do you ask a thirteen-year old her career goals? How do you even get away with that? What possible useful input could someone that young have about something so life-defining? What was she going to be? A teacher? A scientist? A rock star, maybe. Or a writer? Living in some cabin on a dramatic cliff overlooking the gray Atlantic as her fingers clicked over a mechanical typewriter.

And now she was a janitor. Oh, they said it was maintenance but at this point Bea was no longer willing to comfort herself with the illusion. She was a janitor. And she felt tired. And her feet ached. She was twenty-five years old and her knees twinged like she was a geriatric because even before she came to Old Harbor to become a janitor, she was hauling bags of road salt into her family’s hardware store and goddammit there she was thinking about the hardware store. She mentally ground down on the thought like it was a cigarette butt. She really could use a smoke but she had forced herself to ration it out until her paycheck. That was the thing she had to look forward to.

Bea ran a finger along her collarbone. She felt the silver chain of her necklace. Delicate little chains but strong. The little ankh she wore around her neck and underneath her shirt was a patch of cool metal against her skin. When she was younger she had an embarrassing collection of shirts with ankhs printed on them. It was a phase. It was the symbol of life. So if anyone asked about her social life, she could hold up the little bauble and say “see, I got it right here,” and everyone would laugh at her charming, self-effacing little joke.

No one had ever asked her that.

Which was probably for the best. It was a terrible joke. Bea heaved a sigh and pushed herself away from the counter. She opened the shoe closet that doubled as her storage space, finding her sleep clothes in the heavy-duty canvas duffel bag that held most of her belongings, the rest stored in a box underneath. She knocked on Jackie’s door to borrow her shower. Washing away the grime of the day lifted her mood somewhat and when she settled onto the couch back in the front room she felt a bit more relaxed. A bit more ready to face the next day of work. The day after that? The interminable stretch of however much time where she would be a janitor? That still filled her with a generalized dread. But tomorrow felt doable and that was pretty much the best she was going to get.

Folded on top of the couch was the brown fleece-ish throw cover that had become Bea’s blanket. She shook it to its full dimensions and pulled it over her. Then she reached for the sole source of the room’s illumination; the gloomy little lamp on the end table near her head. She scrabbled for its switch and flipped it off.

She willed herself to relax, staring at the textured stucco ceiling illuminated by Old Harbor’s lights streaming in from the window. The swelling and receding sound of cars as regular as waves lapping against aging docks. The sound of her breathing. Bea closed her eyes and tried to push all these reminders of the outside world out of her head, crafting in its stead other visions. A life for herself where she was in college, and not tangential to people who were. She drifted into sleep, hoping to at least dream of this better life if it was nowhere to be found in the land of the waking.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ah, that most wretched of self-indulgent pablum -- the AU. I've wanted to write this story for a long time.
> 
> Two things:
> 
> Updates will likely be slow. It is what it is.
> 
> The setting is very, very loosely based in and around a real place: the Torpedo Factory Art Center in Old Town Alexandria in Virginia. It's nice. It does not have a menacing boiler, as far as I know. I never checked.


	2. The Hammers and Nails of Outrageous Fortune

Bea’s first week on the job went like this:

**Monday**

Paranoid about being late, she had made sure to program her phone with an elaborate sequence of progressively louder alarms, starting an hour before her wake-up time and building to a crescendo. She also set the television to turn itself on fifteen minutes before she had to leave, as a last resort. Bea set it to one of those music stations that reside in the wasteland of the high thousands cable channels.

She woke up half an hour into her phone’s escalating alarms and forgot about the television which meant that the entire apartment was filled with the shrillest of 80s synthwave at 5 in the morning. Jackie came barreling out of her room, wrathful and tangled in her bedsheets. She was an individual who held her sleep time as sacred and inviolable. Anyone foolish enough to intrude on that caught hell.

Bea left the apartment after a thorough if sleep-muddled chewing out and a very firm understanding on how far is too far as far as alarms went. Still, it was a little funny seeing Jackie so worked up. Bea didn’t see the harm in an early start to the day. But she didn’t have much choice in the matter.

At least once during her trek to the art center, a public bus would wheeze by. In the distance she’d hear the hydraulic shriek of their brakes echoing dawn the early morning streets like primordial monsters lurking before the sun rise. The bus _was_ an option, if she felt like splurging. But the art center wasn’t that far a walk and she hated the idea of standing still in this chill, waiting. Better to keep moving and feel the swing of her black iron toed-boots. Bea was a committed adherent to the belief that you need good boots. There was a physical satisfaction in their weight, the heft of them on the ends of her legs and the feel of their thick soles grinding down on the pavement. If the universe wanted to kick Bea than Bea could kick back.

Work was more shadowing. There were other people on the maintenance staff. Men, all in the same washed out jeans and rough shirt garb and all on the generally older and heftier side of things. They were friendly for the most part, when introductions were in order, but Bea found herself on the outside of most of their conversations. They took one look at her and decided she was not of their world. Which suited her. The Janitor was better company. He didn’t seem to have much interest in topics that didn’t involve any immediate task at hand or the latest Smelter’s game, which Bea could hold a conversation about mostly due to when she lived with her father. He was also the only one on the team that seemed to have a fixation on messing around with the boiler in the basement. Which was odd, given the critical nature of the task the way he had described it. Maybe he only trusted himself with working on it? Bea wondered if that meant he trusted her as well. Bea also wondered if this was a really silly thing to feel proud about. She decided it was and discarded the feeling like it was a bad dinner. 

She followed the Janitor as he washed out a clogged drain. Apparently one of the artists was never taught how to properly dispose of leftover oil paint. This was the day where she learned that her arm was slender enough that she could jam it all the way up to her shoulder into the drain access, allowing her to flail a wire scrub blindly around to scratch away the paint. And because she was the _only_ one on the maintenance team that could get that kind of reach, this would be a job she’d be called upon frequently to perform. So that was something to look forward to.

**Tuesday**

Tuesday began with a nightmare, the kind that breaks apart upon waking like wet tissues. Bea woke up sweaty and with a migraine and a vague memory of being stuck in a drain pipe as flood waters rose over Old Harbor’s dock. She left Jackie’s with a banana for breakfast and three aspirin.

When she knocked on the door, the gatekeeper/barista looked at her as if he were about to say something, then seemed to think better of it. Bea wondered if she looked as awful as her brain felt. She hadn’t really checked.

Some of the buildings in Old Harbor had worn, weather-beaten Civil Defense fallout shelter signs on them and Bea wondered if the Glass Factory qualified as one. At the very least it would be nice to know. In advance. Of nuclear war. But also she imagined the labyrinthine underground where she spent most of Tuesday could endure a war or two. The place was a dingy mess but it seemed sturdy. But with no food or water she’d be delaying a slow, awful death by licking the moisture off mildew-stained walls. Getting caught in the blast radius would probably be a mercy in comparison. Gloomy thoughts like these were hard to stave off in the warrens underneath the art center. Bea was spending time down there familiarizing herself with the wiring and utilities. The Janitor had decided that this was a kind of training. Bea was just grateful for the dim environment. It was easy on her eyes and her head, which still throbbed from the morning.

By now she was feeling pretty comfortable with working on the boiler. Being comfortable with the boiler itself was another issue. It gurgled menacingly as she tapped at its weld points with her hammer. Bea tried not to linger once she completed the Janitor’s checklist, which she had written in her phone. It wasn’t that she was _scared_ or anything. Yes it hissed and spat scalding steam, yes it looked like a steampunk spider lurking in the corner ready to pounce, yes she was in the very depths of the building where no one would hear her if she screamed, yes sometimes she swore that the pipes seemed to shift around in between her visits although _of course_ that didn’t actually happen it was just the flickering lights that caused the shadows to move probably…

But there was nothing to be actually scared about. Absolutely not. She was just a busy person. With a very in-demand life that precluded lingering in a dank, moldy, kind of garbage-smelling room. Was that so hard to believe?

In her haste, Bea missed the light switch at the exit, smacking her open palm painfully against the cinder block wall. She winced, cursed, then forced herself to look before turning off the light like a proper damn person and not someone who was _freaking out over a central heating unit_. The rest of her trek through the corridors was filled with considerably less creeping dread and far more embarrassment.

When she returned to the apartment she was so tired that she had energy for nothing else other than pulling her laptop out from the shoe closet and surfing idly while in a sullen, drowsy funk. It felt awful having so much of her time and energy taken from her by the job. She didn’t know how other people did it; getting out of work and… and… _doing things_. Bea could barely work up the effort to cross the room to find her phone charger. Maybe it was her diet. People tire easily if they don’t have proper nutrition, she’s sure she had read that. Or maybe she should exercise? But reference earlier charger dilemma. How about, instead of all that, sitting in front of her computer in a haze of frustration?

That, she could do.

**Wednesday**

This was her day off. And it sucked. She could sleep late which was _awesome_ but beyond that... It sucked.

After seeing Jackie off to her own job, Bea very suddenly and very alarmingly felt the press of time as if the walls around her were closing in. When she looked at the clock all she could see was how many hours she had before she had to go back to sleep to wake up early to walk to work in the dark. When she tried to stream a movie on Jackie’s computer all she could think about was how much time in her life the movie was burning up when she could be doing something useful. When she turned the movie off she couldn’t think of anything useful to do. When she thought of going out, she couldn’t decide where.

She had no social life to speak of in Old Harbor, though it was fair to say she hardly had one before Old Harbor. She dreaded social media; the thought of confronting unanswered e-mail and texts from back home was completely unbearable to her. All she had was the inevitable march of time, ticking away until she had to wake up far too early to a job she hated. She spent the day huddled on one end of the couch, stress-eating an entire bag of ranch Crunchster.

So Wednesday was bad.

**Thursday**

On Thursday Bea woke up with the miasmic anxiety of time slipping away still in her head, but at least she could work to keep herself busy. Maybe that was the secret, the thing that kept everyone going. They work to keep their mind off the life they’re losing to work. It was so perfect it felt like an elegant truth, like a math equation. How terrifying.

Opposite of her side of the street, Bea saw two women. Though the details were lost in the glare of streetlights that threw their features into light and shadow, they seemed well-dressed. They walked, ungainly in high heels and leaned drunkenly against each other. They were whispering fiercely in one another’s ears. An eventful Wednsday night out on the town, evidently. They passed Bea by, but lingered in her thoughts. She decided that they likely led lives of import and great events to be in such a state in the middle of the week. It was interesting to think of the vast gulf of difference between the types of lives people lead. Every life a different path and story and… and…

She felt so thoroughly lost about everything she had been sure about when she was younger.

It occurred to her that she should maybe not feel so despondent over having a job, however menial. That there might, possibly, be worse fates out there than being employed and having shelter. And this was all very true and sensible.

And yet… and yet…

Bea did not want to come to terms with her current situation. She did not want to accept it or be at peace with it or settle or learn to be happy. Bea hated her job. She hated how she felt at the end of her shift. Feeling any other way felt like surrender. She wanted to hold onto her dissatisfaction, to cradle it within her like she would shield the flame of her lighter on a windy day.

She sped up her pace. If these were the kind of thoughts she was going to have today she really did need work to take her mind of things.

**Friday**

The Glass Factory was playing host to a fifth-grade field trip, during which a kid threw up against the third floor railing. It dribbled all the way down to the ground floor. Bea and the Janitor spent a good chunk of time going up and down the building with cleaning supplies, sawdust and a wide variety of brooms and rags and mops.

In the afternoon Bea had to set up for Friday Music Night.

This involved running a great amount of cables over and under an _ad hoc_ stage that had been assembled on the main floor in front of the cafe, allowing patrons to take a seat and a beverage while enjoying the evening show. She helped erect the rig that would hold the lights and ran wires down to the control board. The maintenance team, aging as they were, often had to wrangle someone from the art center’s small colony of office cubicles to program the light cues for them. Bea was able to do it herself after a little trial and error. It felt good, knowing that she could provide more to the job than being an arm that went up a drain pipe.

The music wouldn’t start until well after Bea’s shift had ended. She did not stick around to attend it.

**Saturday**

While trying to free a stepladder from the tangle of broom handles and snarled hoses that infested a supply closet, Bea tried to recall the events of the week thus far and found that all her recollections were a complete fog. Entire days receded from her memory like a fading dream and this alarmed her. She couldn’t recall meals or even specific tasks she performed at work. She tried to remember the last time she had a meaningful conversation with someone that wasn’t about hammers and nails. She was sure she talked about something with Jackie, but couldn’t fill in the details.

It was kind of terrifying to think of how much of her own life was now beyond her ability to recall. Did everyone feel this way or was it a symptom of her personal misery? Which answer would be the more palatable one?

The stepladder was pulled free with a lurch and Bea skipped over the floor with her arms wrapped tightly around it. With the ladder retrieved the thought she was chasing faded from her immediate attention. She had a drop ceiling with tiles that needed replacing.

**Sunday**

Bea sat by herself on the end of Jackie’s couch on this, her day off. She felt this was as good a time as any to nail down this feeling that had been hounding her lately. The way the world seemed to constrict around her, the way her rib cage seemed to tighten around her heart and lungs, cutting off her air, making her pulse thud in her head. How her time at work was spent in a daze and how her time away from it was spent being anxious. She sounded out words to describe it, as one might try on shoes. Worried? Far too mild. Panicky? Sometimes, yeah, but this was more of a constant thing. Depression? Let’s not throw around clinical terms without a clinical diagnosis. Forlorn? Too poetic, but getting there. Condemned? Close. Desolate? It was just on the tip of her tongue and she was really getting somewhere with the d-words. Melodramatic? Okay, _yes,_ but now was not the time for sarcasm.

“Doomed,” she said aloud to an audience of zero. It felt so perfect that it couldn’t stay in her head, it spilled out of her mouth unbidden. That was it.

She felt doomed.

Bea was doomed.

Putting a word to it didn’t make her feel better about it at all.

~~~

In the pre-dawn dark of the following Monday Bea pressed her identification against the glass door and knocked. The barista, same as the every morning before, looked up from behind the counter, put down the carafe in his hands and walked over.

Except something must have changed because for the first time ever, he actually talked to her. “You don’t have keys?” he said as he opened the door.

“We get keys?” said Bea. She stepped in and unzipped her jacket.

“Maintenance gets keys.”

“I don’t have keys,” she said.

“Hm.” The barista seemed to considered this, shrugged, then returned to the cafe. Outside of Jackie, this was the most involved conversation that Bea had that didn’t involve a direct superior in regards to work.

If maintenance gets keys and Bea was maintenance yet did _not_ get keys was Bea still maintenance? Why couldn’t she have gotten a job at the Glass Factory Philosophy Center, where someone could answer that for her? And why did she have to think hot fire like this silently, to herself? There came times when she wished she had friends, plural. She huffed and hunched her shoulders as she made her way to the sub-basement. There, she clocked in and waved a hello to the Janitor, who she had accepted was a permanent fixture in his seat. Did he ever leave? Did he even sleep? Bea would never know, owing to she mostly didn’t care.

Most of the day was spent doing stuff that had become routine. In the latter half of her shift, Bea found herself back in the sub-basement again with the Janitor, who was doing some obligatory paperwork.

“Daylight Saving Time coming in a couple weeks,” he said conversationally.

“Um. Yes. This is true,” said Bea.

“Gonna have to remember to set all them clocks back,” he said.

Bea pursed her lips. “In the 21st century, where I come from, clocks do that themselves.”

“Must be nice,” said the Janitor. “But we got 27 clocks in the factory that’ll need to be set by hand, so keep an eye out.”

“Keep an eye out for clocks. You don’t, I don’t know, happen to know where they all are?”

The Janitor shrugged. “People’ll move them around. Or add new ones. Ain’t like you got to register clocks or nothing like that. You did a good job setting up that stage last week, by the by. How’d you get so good with computers?”

Bea shrugged. “I don’t know. I use them a lot.”

The Janitor tilted his head. Then he nodded. “That’d do it. The boys were happy not to deal with that pain in the ass. You see the show?”

“Um. No. Kind of tired after work.”

“I know that feeling.” The Janitor stretched and his joints popped like distant firecrackers. “Shame. Good show.”

“They play good music?”

“Not all of it’s for me. But I like the folk band. Music from the mountains back home.”

That was something they had in common. She opened her mouth to say something, then elected not to. The less said about “back home” the better. “Next time, then,” she said, very much lying.

“Leastways it’s a better way to spend your evening than coming in during Comedy Night. Oof. Now there’s an acquired taste. You’ll have to set up the stage for that, by the way. End of this week. There’s a show of one sort or the other at the end of every week.”

“Okay.”

“In the meantime…” the Janitor pulled a clipboard out from under a pile of thumbtacks, which fell to the floor in a jingling shower. “Got a work request. One of the artists does things with computers and his studio’s been blowing out its wires. They’re pretty old and held together with duct tape. We just got in the new wiring to fix that, so good idea to get it taken care of before it starts a fire. Up for it?”

“Strip out old wires, splice in new ones? Yeah, I’ve done that.”

“Ain’t that a thing. All yours.” The Janitor handed her the clipboard. “New wires are sitting in the receiving room. Scope out the work space and take whatever tools you need. Ring me up when you got questions.”

Bea raised an eyebrow. This has been the most hands-off he had been since she’d started. Not that she was going to complain. “Great,” she said.

As she walked she read up on the work order. Second floor studio, next to an electrical panel so hey, three cheers for actually planning a studio around the medium used. Artist who filled out the work order was Angus Delaney, one of the part timers with a day job. Probably wouldn’t even be there. Which suited her, she preferred to work without an audience.

It was fairly obvious which studio was his. Among the canvases and sculptures, his was the one with the door framed by old, deactivated CRT monitors held up on wall mounts. They were old, but not vintage old, just outdated old. Like they had come off the AV cart of a public school.

The studio window had a few personal touches. Stickers. A rainbow flag, a _pi_ symbol, a Blanktones band logo and a “Stop the turnUP HQ Development Project” sticker, which was a local favorite among Old Harbor’s more activist types. Jackie had, like, six of them on her laptop.

Bea came up to the door, put her hand to the knob and found that it didn’t turn. She looked at the knob as if it had offended her.

“Stupid, stupid Bea,” she said softly to herself. Someone had said “keys” right to her face and she had forgotten to ask the Janitor about it completely. Now she had to waste time going back and…

“Uh, can I help you?”

Bea tensed up and rounded on the voice. The art center wasn’t very active this time on a weekday and she wasn’t expecting anyone up here aside from a handful of grad students who basically lived in their studios, hidden behind their growing piles of portfolio contributions. Anybody coming up behind her better have a good reason to —

“My studio’s not open, it’s uh, technical difficulties.”

He was a big guy and he looked down at her while holding in one hand his phone and in the other a cup of coffee from the cafe. He dressed in a tweedy, professorial manner: green sweater over a dress shirt and tie. Slacks and dress shoes. He wore big, round-framed glasses with thick lenses. He had dark brown skin and his curly black hair was shaved close and neat. He wore the most absurd little black fedora and upon seeing it Bea kind of wanted to snatch it away and toss it over the side on basic principle. But that probably wasn’t the best kind of first impression to make, so she elected to say something instead.

“Technical difficulty is what I’m all about.” Bea held up her clipboard. “Are you Angus Delaney? You filled out this work request?”

“Oh. Uh. Yeah, yeah, I am. Wow, I didn’t realize you were here for that.”

“You didn’t realize because…” Bea arched her eyebrow. She was good at that, the arched eyebrow. One time she shot that look at a catcaller across the street and he turned his attention away from her so fast she was quite sure he sustained a whiplash injury.

“Oh, because I filled that out like three months ago.”

Bea pursed her lips. She looked down at the clipboard. “So it was. How about that. You’ve closed your studio this whole time?”

“No way, I still pay and everything. I just, like, jury-rigged the wires.”

“You did _what?_ ” A customer coming up with their own hack job repairs were basically the number one hazard when Bea had done house calls. One time she had to rip out a shower fixture that some guy had decided he could install himself. Maybe he could have, if he had bothered to pay attention instead of hooking up the shower to his septic tank. Bea had charged extra for that one. A lot extra.

Angus nodded. “It’s cool, I’m —”

“I’m going to have to take a look,” Bea said.

“Okay.” He pocketed his phone and fished out his keys. The studio was neatly arranged. When Angus stepped aside to let Bea in she had to admit that he made good use of space. The studios always seemed smaller inside than they did from without, and artists tended to get disorganized, cluttering the space further. Angus had the floor clear, desk space sorted nicely and — if the broom caddy in the corner was any indication — he even swept up from time to time. He was either conscientious or these were all hallmarks of neuroses. But hey she only just met him, too early to rule out both.

A neat row of blank CRT televisions sat on a single shelf and one sat in the middle of his desk. And under it…

“Wow,” said Bea. “Is that an actual VCR player? In this, the 21st century?” It was gray and blocky. The wide mouth of its slot was open with a cassette sticking partway out. 

“Ha ha, yeah.”

“I feel like it might crumble if I touch it.”

“Nah, they built these pretty sturdy. You could, like, kill a guy with it. Um. I mean…” Angus scratched the side of his face. “That was weird to say. Nevermind.”

Bea lifted her eyebrow again. “It’s cool. So what have you done?”

“Well, I haven’t killed anyone with it.”

“No, I meant you said you jury-rigged stuff.”

“Right, right.” Angus moved around her, giving her a fastidious “pardon me” as he did. Then he knelt down under the row of televisions and pushed aside a nest of wiring to reveal an access panel.

“I think you should let me open that,” Bea said. “The stuff back there you really shouldn’t mess with.”

Angus turned to give her a long look. Then shrugged. “Okay, yeah, I guess this is your job.”

“It is, in fact, my job.”

The hack job that Bea was expecting when she removed the panel was… well… it wasn’t. It was actually fairly well done and all with off-the-shelf stuff. Angus did not have access beyond what the panel afforded so his splice job was limited, but that were the correct gauge, the connectors were wrapped in electrician’s tape. Honestly Bea had half expected him to be electrocuted if he tried to open the panel. She had seen it happen before. People didn’t really respect what an electric current could do to a body.

Still, it didn’t pay to encourage civilians to step on _her_ turf. 

“It’s not too bad, but you really should have let us handle this.”

“I mean, yeah, but again it’s been three months since I put in that request and I’m still paying for the studio space, so… I like, did that. I make sure to turn everything off when the wires run too hot.”

“Wow, okay. You can… I don’t know, talk to the management about all that stuff? For reimbursement. I’m not saying that will happen, I actually don’t know how that works. I just don’t want to walk into the studio to find a fried corpse. Seriously, this place is way more rickety than it looks.” Probably not the best thing to say to a leasee, but whatever. “Like, fiddling with this is genuinely a good way to get yourself killed. Then I’d have to clean up the mess.”

His shoulders slumped and he finally relented. “Yeah, okay. That’s fair. I say that kind of thing to people at my own job.”

Bea nodded. “Okay. Well. Good. I’m going to go get the tools and get started.”

Once Bea had retrieved her tools and the new wire, she spent most of the time in a crawlspace sandwiched between Angus’ studio and the neighboring one. Working in the renovated section of the building, Bea was pleased to see a reasonably modern interface. She was less pleased to see the amount of frayed wiring. Even the adjoining studio had wires that needed replacement. It occurred to Bea that the rest of the building could possibly be in a similar state. It was only brought to attention here with the one person who relied heavily on electronic devices. Bea imagined replacing every inch of wire in the factory. Her mind quailed at it.

The job took longer than she would have preferred, but she’d like to see anyone else on the maintenance staff try to maneuver in the tight space. After some time, she climbed out and restored the power.

“Okay,” she said as she stepped into Angus’ studio. “Give it a shot.”

From where he sat at his desk Angus bent down to flip a switch on his power strip. Red power indicators lit up across his televisions and the cassette player.

“Heyyyyyy,” he said as his devices responded one by one. They gave that satisfying, archaic _thunk_ with each button pressed. “Nice.”

“Yeah,” said Bea. “No setting fire to your workspace or anything.”

“You never appreciate the little things in life until you’re on fire.”

“Understandable. If the choice is immolation or taking things for granted, I’ll choose the latter,” said Bea. At this point she should have dusted her hands off, said ‘welp, that’s a job well done’ and carted her tools back down to the sub-basement. But she was tired and her knees hurt from curling up in the crawlspace. “But you must really like your, uh, art if you were using your own supplies to fix things.”

Angus rubbed the back of his neck. “I suppose, yeah. I mean… it’s a hobby and — ha ha — I don’t have much of a life outside of it. So I guess I don’t mind spending a little money. Besides, I’m a licensed electrician so it kind of felt like if I couldn’t solve a problem like this I’m not really earning it, you know?”

“Really?” said Bea, looking at him. “A licensed electrician?”

“It’s not nearly as impressive as it sounds. You basically go to a government building and fill out a form and pay a fee and that’s it. I thought you had to take, like, an exam or something, but apparently the requirement varies from state to state.”

“Hm,” said Bea. For the first time she noticed the picture frames hanging on one side of the studio. They were simple and modern which went well with the subject matter. Most of the photographs were black fields with vivid white lines running through them. The lines were bent and distorted. In some they were compressed to thin, vibrant threads that weaved like a meandering river. In others they were blown up so large that the individual dots of red, green and blue were visible; picked out from the white like a lifting of the veil to reveal the underpinnings of the cosmos.

Then there were other pictures that were inexplicable photos of celebrities or movie scenes comically or grotesquely distorted. Enlarged foreheads, big teeth, shrunken eyes like a boardwalk caricature sketch.

“What kind of art do you do anyway?” said Bea.

Angus adjusted his glasses. “I, uh, so basically I have this television here. It’s an old model CRT that projects electrons, right? So what I do is I put magnets on the screen and, you know, different size magnets, different strength, like rare-earth magnets. And they distort whatever image is on the screen. And I use a real high-res camera to capture the distortions. Like, most of the time I just use a simple series of lines since that’s the easiest way to see what kind of effect magnets have on electrons and it looks cool. But I can project whatever on the screen, you know? Like, anything that’s been on television, anyway. So if you want to see your favorite movie star’s head all distorted by magnets then I can like, do that. For a price. I mean, I know that it seems super basic and you can take like a fridge magnet and do it on your TV at home provided it’s old enough, so, uh, heh.”

“Hm. It’s novel,” said Bea. Angus angled his head down in what Bea took to be disappointment. _What do you expect when you give an art spiel to a janitor?_ , she thought. Still, she scrabbled for something more she could say. “Your sign says you do digital art, but this is, like, all magnets.”

“I know, right? Well, I guess the camera I use is digital. I tried to explain that, but the representative who interviewed me for my application saw me using computers and stuff so he decided that I do digital art. I try not to let it bother me.”

Bea looked at him and cracked a smile, already anticipating his next words. 

“Sometimes it seriously bothers me,” Angus confessed.

“I can etch you up a new sign,” said Bea. “I mean, we make them all and nobody will probably notice.”

“Nah, I’m good. Appreciate the offer though.”

“What would you even call what you do, though? What do you title these?” She gestured at the picture frames.

“Never really thought of a name. _Delaney Untitled Works #1-17_ , maybe.”

“ _Composition in Electron Projections and Magnetic Fields,_ ” Bea offered.

“ _Neo Cathode Ray Tubism_.”

Bea tilted her head. This was probably the longest conversation she had with another person in some time and it was unexpectedly stimulating. She wondered, if she _really_ stretched herself, if she could make more of the topic of his art beyond the pretty lame verbal shrug she had offered him earlier. She watched idly as the television in front of her played through its recording: two bright, white lines on a black field. She hummed thoughtfully.

“What?” said Angus.

“I mean, it’s all physics, uh, what you’re doing. If you know the exact conditions you could replicate any one of these photographs down to the molecule. Which magnet, placed where, at what point during the tape’s playback. Like, it’s 100% reproducible because it’s science.” Bea was not entirely sure where she was going with this.

Angus nodded. “Yeah.”

His prompting gave her impetus to push on. “But a painting can’t be recreated like that,” she said. “The brush strokes alone, their weight and size and the position of each individual bristle… I… a long time ago I went to this art museum with all sorts of paintings. And I remember one — oil painting — that was so big, like from floor to ceiling, done like 200 years ago. And you could stand back and see the whole of it or you could walk right up and you could see the swirl of the paints. All dried and cracked. They were like mountain ranges and valleys, all carved into shape by the brush. It was like… you could almost imagine the movement of the arm that made it, you know? Like you could feel the emotion behind it. But _you_ don’t work with something that’s governed by, uh, raw emotion — shut up, you know what I mean. You use a medium that’s been defined by mathematics,” Bea gestured to the photographs, “you could totally remake any of these with the write equations.” 

It was, Bea felt, an interesting philosophical musing on the nature of art and how expanding it into non-traditional medium could call into question long-standing assumptions regarding creativity. However, as she talked she also came to realize it was also, basically, shitting all over this dude’s work. Her words started to trail off as she tore her eyes from the pictures and looked at Angus. “Um. Or something like that,” she finished feebly. “Sorry, um, if I…”

Angus made a placating gesture with one hand and smiled. “No, no, it’s totally cool. That was actually the most anyone ever has said about my stuff. And you’re totally correct, as far as being able to recreate any of these pictures.” He crossed his arms, leaned against his desk and looked up at the ceiling with a thoughtful expression. “But I don’t buy the idea that one strain of art is suffused with meaning while the other is sterile. You can argue the intent and the emotion that might reside behind the brush stroke, but in the end the emotion is not actually there. The brush strokes are. It’s like when people talk about having a soul or whatever when they are referring to their own consciousness. Like, when you say ‘I’ what is it that you’re referring to? There’s only one organ in your body that’s capable of that kind of cognition and it’s your brain. Like, people talk about what their heart thinks, or what their gut feels, or how there’s a soul inside of us, and that it’s, uh, what we are. But the only thing inside of you that thinks and feels and is capable of perceiving itself as a thing that _is_ is your brain. Even in the face of this, you know, actual scientific fact, we still ascribe emotion to other parts of our body. And we do the same thing with art. Or music. Or anything that’s meant to be expressive. But it’s just photons or sound waves.”

“Huh,” said Bea.

“Besides, emotions are just glands and neurons. Dopamine and adrenaline and stuff like that.”

Bea raised an eyebrow and pursed her lips. “You’ve been thinking about this kind of thing a lot, haven’t you?”

Angus’ eyes darted to the side and he looked abashed. “Uh. I guess I have.”

“So is all art purposeless? Just smears of color on a canvas?”

“I mean, no. Not at all. But art isn’t happening on the canvas. It’s like, in our brains. It’s not the brush strokes, it’s what seeing the brush strokes does to your brain. That’s where the emotions and stuff come in. I think in psychology it’s called ‘mirroring’. If there’s meaning, then its meaning that occurred within the mind of the creator. And if that meaning is going to be interpreted, it’s done so in the mind of the audience. You can say that a piece of art makes you feel a certain way or is meant to evoke a certain feeling, because those feelings are a neurological phenomenon, and they can be measured. But to say that the art _is_ a feeling, to separate oil painting from pixels, I feel, imbues the medium with undue significance. When you talk to someone over the phone, you don’t think that the phone is that person. When you look at art, the meaning isn’t on the canvas, it’s what the canvas makes you think and feel. Also I take issue with the implication that my art wasn’t made in an emotional fashion. How do you know I wasn’t, like, super stoked when I put a magnet on a screen?”

“Heh. So what meaning did you intend in the distortion of these lines? The hills and valleys and attenuations?”

Angus looked at his work and he shrugged. “Magnets are real fucking cool.” 

Bea snorted as she tried to suppress a giggle.

“And hey,” said Angus, “once you get down to the quantum level, _everything_ is a magnetic field. Maybe I’m actually a visionary and history will recognize my brilliance.”

“Hah. Well, if you should happen upon recognition I hope you won’t forget us little people, especially the ones that fixed your wires.” Bea straightened up. “I should probably get going. I’m sure there’s something I’m meant to be doing right now.”

“Alright, cool. See you around and thanks.”

“Yeah, just break something and I’ll be around in three months to fix it,” Bea said. “But yeah, I’m here most days.”

“Same.”

“Aren’t you a part-timer? Don’t you have work?”

“Not today, but even on workdays I drop by after my shift. No life, remember? Plus I work pretty close.”

“Yeah? What do you do? With your license and all?”

“I make professional-grade e-cigarette mods.”

“Wow,” said Bea. “That is the most… I’m not sure what that sentence was the most of, but it’s definitely the most of that.” A memory flickered in Bea’s head. “So, wait, do you work at the place a few blocks away? Has a mannequin’s head in the display window? It wears sunglasses, has like 20 vape pens stuck in its mouth? Wears a trucker’s cap that says ‘VAPE GOON’ on it?”

Angus smiled and nodded. “Oh yeah, you’ve been there?”

“God no, but I walk by it on the way to work. Wasn’t aware that was electrician’s work.”

“Oh sure, it’s niche but there’s folks who want to mod out their rigs in all sorts of ways.”

“Interesting.”

“Better than my last job,” said Angus. “Clerk at a video rental store. Like, the last of its kind in Old Harbor.”

“Yeah that is a relic.”

“Thing is, it’s kind of not. Like, not everyone has internet you know? People still came by. But the rent kept going up and up until it was too much. I think it’s an outlet store now.”

“Do you have a ‘VAPE GOON’ cap?” said Bea.

“No. No I do not.” Angus’ hand went up to his little hat as if making sure it was still there.

Bea eventually got out of his studio and carted away her gear. If the Janitor had noted her long absence, he did not bring it up.

“Job’s a good one?” he said.

“All finished,” said Bea.

“Ain’t that a thing. ‘Bout time for you to call it quits today.”

Bea’s eyes flicked towards the dusty wall clock and holy shit, so it was. “Um. It took longer than I—”

“Don’t pay that no mind.” The Janitor waved his hand as if her concern was a wisp of smoke to clear away. “It takes as long as it takes and that’s all there is to it. You go and make a final check of the Black Goat and you can call it a day. Go on, now. Got a Smelter’s game to watch.”

Bea nodded and turned smartly. She had to acknowledge grudgingly the benefits of having a boss who didn’t micromanage her time. She sure as hell wasn’t so lax when _she_ was…

Well. She just had to acknowledge it.

The transition from the beating heart of the art center to the decaying bones of the glass factory was uncanny as per usual, but Bea suppressed the shiver. She felt… better. Yes. Better was a good word for it. Not great, not good, just better than the plateau of _blah_ that she had been trudging on for the past long while. She was about to get off work, she had an interesting conversation and, bonus, she didn’t have to clean up any kid puke. Today was shaping up to be one of the better days.

Bea rounded the corner into the boiler room with the practiced ease of having done so many times before. She slapped the light panel and stepped down the sudden drop like it was no thing. She fished out her wrench and, hell, why not, she twirled it around her fingers like a gunslinger because —

Lines of tension caught her wrist. She dropped the wrench and jerked with alarm to one side as she felt her fingers snag in mid-air. That’s when her _face_ got wrapped up in more thin strands of _something_.

“What the f— augh!” Bea spluttered as a line drifted over her lips. At first she thought a spider had spun its web right in her path but these lines were tough. They didn’t cut into her skin but they sure as hell didn’t offer much give either. She stepped backwards and for the first time since entering the room took an actual good look.

The dim industrial lights caught gossamer lines like fine rays of sun suspended in the air. Bea followed the catch of the light in bewilderment, tracking the vibrating lines with her eyes until she saw that a fishing pole had been wedged between two valves. She tugged on the line and watched the reel of the pole twitch. The line had been extended over half the damn room, looped through valves forming criss-crossing webs. She caught another irregular shape from the corner of her eye. She looked and blinked quizzically at a badminton racket. It was sticking out of a vacant gauge socket, rattling from the hum of working machinery, casting weird, juddering shadows as it did.

Bea slowly backed away, heart working itself into a frenzy. She had no idea what to make of this new situation. Scenarios ran through her head, growing more outlandish and lurid in their phantasmagoric imaginings of what it all meant but through it all was one common denominator: someone had been here (or still was here! Bea’s escalating imagination screamed at her. Still here and possibly insane!) and they were messing with shit they probably ought not to mess with. She closed her hands up into fists and shuffled backwards away from the boiler. She could get the Janitor. Should. Smelters game be damned, this was something that required two people at minimum. Yes.

She was just about to make for the exit when, as she turned on her feet, one leg got caught on a loose object, causing her to fall on her side. She braced herself, landing on the gritty concrete floor with a minor scrape on her palm and _something_ tangled up between her legs. She propped herself up on her two hands and looked at it.

It looked back.

Lifting one boot off its beard and paunchy belly, Bea found herself face-to-face with the blank porcelain stare of a lawn gnome. Its paint-chipped face disconcerting and cherubic. An awful pointy hat. Stupid shoes with buckles. Eyes big with an idiot stare. She stared right back, her eyes at that moment just as big and stupid and uncomprehending.

“What,” she said, “the fuck.”

The gnome stared and provided no answer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you'd like to see what Angus' art might look like I basically referenced:  
> Nam June Paik _Magnet TV_  
>  Carston Nicolai _crt mgn_


	3. A Normal Human Person's Guide to Relaxing

Bea sat on the floor, in front of an exposed vent. She had removed the grill and leaned it against the wall. She sprayed it with cleaning solution and left it to loosen up the years of caked-on grime. The screws that had held it in place had been meticulously collected to be soaked in a bowl of water mixed with vinegar. A coarse-bristled brush in hand, she worked at the sides of the vent furiously, mixing whispered profanity with her labored breath.

She was not in the art center. It was her day off. She was in Jackie’s apartment, on the floor in the kitchen, working away at the vent. It was a common task at work and now she was doing it here. If some hypothetical person were to pull her aside and ask her what she was doing, such a person would have even odds of receiving an angry glare or a scrub brush to the teeth. Then Bea would laugh and there would be a hysterical edge to it because the truth of it was, she didn’t really know. She had been stewing on the couch — again — when a notion got into her brain that she should clean the vent. There had been a barrier between her work and life that she maintained with conviction and this sudden impulse had broken it down. The realization of it had left her brittle and she could either panic or she could continue to clean the damn vent.

So there was that.

Ever since the gnome incident, Bea had felt on edge. Yes she didn’t _like_ being in the boiler room on a normal day, but it was _familiar_. It was creepy but she could count on it being a kind of creepy she could anticipate. Knowing that she could walk into the room one day without knowing what to expect made her grind her teeth until her jaw hurt and she had to consciously relax her muscles until she could work her mouth open. Somebody had taken something from her and she was not at all happy. Worse, nobody really seemed to care. The Janitor had shrugged it off and cleaned up the mess and that was the end of it. It made her want to punch something. 

Bea sat up from the vent and turned to the vent grill. She started scrubbing, hard enough that metal shavings were coming off. They lay on the floor like glittering constellations.

When Jackie came home a short while later and tossed off a quick greeting, Bea whipped around and snapped: “What?”

Jackie looked at her for a long moment with appraising eyes. Bea turned away and wanted to crawl into the vent and hide when she realized just how badly she had lost her cool.

“We,” said Jackie, voice deadly serious, “are going out to have fun.”

Bea looked up at her. “We’re what?”

“We are going out to have fun, Bea. You and me.”

“Um. No, I’m good.” Aside from the vent, she had a busy schedule full of self-pity. She hated self-pity so she found herself making room for self-loathing immediately after, which only loaded more self-pity onto her itinerary. Really there was no space for “fun” on her mental calendar.

“No. You’re not,” said Jackie. “This is not you being good. This is you being goddamn miserable and it’s been going on way too long now. The night is still young so we are going to make the most of it.”

 _I must make a hell of a sight_ , Bea thought. Her shoulders fell as her tense muscles went slack.

“Look, I’m not gonna force you,” Jackie continued, “but —”

“Okay,” said Bea.

“Okay? As in —”

“Okay as in yeah, let’s go. I think if I stay in here a minute longer I’m going to put my head through the wall.”

Jackie put her hands on her hips. “I was expecting a harder fight.”

Bea cracked what she was sure was her first smile that day. “You would’ve lost.”

“Like hell.”

“You wanna do this? Do you even know how to have fun?”

“Girl you aren’t one to talk. We’re gonna have so much fun. People are going to die.”

Bea rolled her eyes. “Okay, that’s not—”

“We’re going to burn down entire city blocks.”

“I think that—”

Jackie stopped short and looked thoughtful. “Any requests?”

Bea hadn’t seen that much of Old Harbor, spending most of her time lost in the fog of her own thoughts. She trawled her memory until she snagged a recollection. “Didn’t you say something a while back about a restaurant? Supposed to be a great, uh, samosa place?”

“Oh yeah. They closed.”

“Aw. When?”

“Two months ago? I… when did you hear about them? When did I talk about them? God, like spring? In an e-mail. That was before you came here.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, real shame.” Jackie examined her fingernails. “Their space is a concept cupcake bakery now.”

“What the hell is a concept cupcake bakery?”

“Let’s just say if you ever need cupcakes special ordered three months in advance and infused with cedar bark and sprinkled with ground up pine cones or shaped like tiny Dutch windmills and you need them to cost, like, fifty bucks each, then that’s the place for you.”

“That sounds awful. Who buys that?”

“Awful people. They advertise that they mix their batter with unfiltered actual sea water to give it ‘authenticity’ or something. I guess garbage water is in with rich folks now. Anyway, everything north of the main drag is overpriced garbage. I know a place, I’ll take you there.”

Bea got up, ignoring the twinge in her knees, the ache in the soles of her feet. It took a little time to get ready, everything beyond her most functional clothes were still packed away. She managed a blouse, not too wrinkled. Jeans with a flare leg. All black, because Bea believed in commitment. She raided Jackie’s makeup kit and plundered the eyeliner in particular. Other than that, she kept her touch light. She didn’t really mess with makeup that much. Her mother was the one who had taught her. Lessons didn’t go on for very long.

They left the apartment. Jackie turned to lock the door and Bea looked up. Somewhere past the sodium-yellow street lights was a night sky full of stars she could not see.

Part of Bea wanted to call this whole thing off. She had to get to work early in the morning. But at this point even she was beginning to tire of her litany of protests. Better to let Jackie take the lead and then blame her once it all goes badly. Nothing starts the day right like a good, solid “I told you so.” It was like caffeine for Bea.

The two of them walked, side by side heading west away from the river. Old Harbor was an L-shaped grid of streets that followed the curve of the Red Winder on its east side. To the west, the roads ran along blocks of dense, old brick rows that tapered off into miles of tract houses and grimy strip malls until they were circumscribed by the interstate highway. From there on it was the rolling hills and the valleys where the little towns of Deep Hollow died slow deaths.

Compared to all that, the expanse and the sprawl behind it, Old Harbor was pretty small. It was funny how large it was in Bea’s head. Even bigger than Bright Harbor. Bright Harbor was like the flat texture of a city in a video game skybox. Thought it was across the river it felt inaccessible. A postcard picture. Wish you were here. So did she.

On paper, Old Harbor was a college town in that it had a college. But it was the kind that had more parking decks than dormitories. Students commuted from elsewhere or the college put them up in the privately owned decaying brownstone row houses and apartment blocks nearby. Not the kind of place that would make any list of top party colleges. What parties were thrown were, to hear Jackie tell it, tinged with a manic desperation and unpleasant energy. Students feeling cheated they weren’t getting the experience they expected, shady locals circling the periphery like buzzards ready to swoop in to sell bad drugs to kids who thought they could get high from ground up chalk or moss scraped off the side of a brick wall.

“Why even party here, at the end of the day?” Jackie was saying. “Bright Harbor is just across the river and the ferry runs 24 hours. At least there you don’t run the risk of drinking moonshine that was made in a gas can a raccoon peed in.”

“You’re really selling me on this night out on the town, Jackie. Really hitting the highlights,” said Bea.

“It’s not all vicious and gross. There’s good folks. We live in the gutter and you gotta scrape off the top layer of muck is all.”

“You should submit that to the Harbor Gazette, they’d eat it up.”

“Shut up. I instantly regret saying that.”

“They’ll put it in the ‘Townies Talk’ section.”

“God.”

“’Quintessentially Quotable Quotes from the Quotidian Quorum,’” said Bea.

“ _Dammit_. That tagline always makes me so mad.”

“Do you think liking alliteration is a prerequisite for writing fluff pieces for a small town newspaper?”

“I don’t know but every time I see that I want to break their fingers so they can’t use a keyboard.”

“Killer crossword puzzles though.”

“It’s just syndicated.”

“Maybe the reporting is worthwhile?” Bea suggested.

“The hell it is. God, why am I even talking about this? Oh right, you were needling me.”

“I was needling you,” said Bea. “That’s where _I_ get my fun.”

“Insufferable. Here we are.”

Jackie had led Bea south, where the river turned east to the sea and the advancing wave of gentrification had yet to lap against the mean little buildings of Old Harbor. The sidewalks were narrower, brick structures crowding closer to the road as if they could shoulder pedestrians off and into the path of an oncoming car. Doors and windows were barred with wrought iron security fences. Pawn shops and liquor stores, tiny grocer’s markets and souvenir shops, antique places and locksmiths.

They stood in front of a bar. The window was dingy, smudges of figures moving behind the glass. A neon sign, delicate cursive incongruous with the weathered brick block of a building, burned an afterimage into the smoke-stained glass and advertised in bright flickering red that the place was called “MILLER’S”.

“A dive bar in the crappy side of town,” Bea said. She looked at Jackie. “I have to admit I, was just kidding when I said you didn’t know how to have fun but now I see the statement is fully justified. You know I barely drink, right?”

Jackie stuffed her hands into the pockets of her windbreaker and grinned. “This isn’t just a dive bar. Thursdays are karaoke night.”

Bea’s eyes widened. She counted off the days in her head. The job had completely skewed her mental calendar. Rather than reckoning the passing of time by weekdays and weekends Bea’s weeks were defined by the days she had work and the days she had off, which shifted constantly. After taking an alarming amount of time, her brain reached its dread conclusion: it was karaoke night.

“Jackie… no. No, no, no.”

Jackie’s grin widened. “Yes, Bea. Yes.”

“You cannot make me get up on a stage. I will kill myself with my own teeth first.”

“Come on you big baby, nobody’s gonna make you do anything. Let’s just hang out.”

Bea called in her smoker’s privilege to delay things, sucking down a new cigarette while Jackie crossed her arms in wait. By the time the flames inexorably burned to the filter, Bea had been chomping down on it until her teeth nearly sawed clean through. She spat what remained out, exhaled a breath of nicotine, inhaled night air, and sighed.

“This is so completely unnecessary,” said Jackie.

“Whatever. Alright. I’m ready.” Bea rolled her shoulders back and stood up straight.

“Why am I friends with the one person who treats walking into a bar like she was just asked to undergo a dental procedure without painkillers?”

“Clearly because you deserve this. Let’s go.”

The double doors were heavy, varnished wooden slabs that did a marvelous job of muffling all the sound on the other side. As soon as Bea pulled one door open the dread din of karaoke rolled forth like floodwaters over a levee. The interior was dim, lit by pinpricks of light like stars that were multicolored and swirling. Tacky little disco balls spinning like faceted pulsars hung from the ceiling on either side of a stage that was more like a small step-up from the rest of the floor. It took up the space on one end of the bar, filtered lights pointed down to highlight performers in a nauseous jelly-bean vomit mix of clashing colors. At the moment, a bulky, balding middle-aged man in a bowling shirt with flame prints on its sleeves was standing doubled-over, both hands shaking as they held a microphone in a death grip as he sang-slash-screamed the words of a thirty-year old romantic power ballad. The kind that used words like ‘love’ and ‘wings’ and ‘souls’ and ‘forever’ and made aggressive use of soaring string instruments. His face was red and eyes screwed closed and he actually had a decent if undisciplined baritone. Props for throwing himself into the production without reservation, Bea decided. If he were trying any harder, she’d be concerned about his blood pressure.

The bar had that slightly sickening beer smell that Bea had never gotten used to but it wasn’t so objectionable to make Bea want to turn around, so hey, one small victory for actually going outside, she supposed.

“Let’s grab a table,” said Jackie.

“How about here?” Bea pointed at one of the booths that lined the walls.

“Uh. No. We can’t see the stage from there.” Jackie looked at Bea’s expression. “God sakes, I promise this is not some juvenile trick to get you on the stage. I’m above that.”

They sat near the first row at a table of dark oak with a varnished finish that glistened slick in the low light. It rocked on uneven legs when Bea settled her elbows on the surface and she could see years of accumulated rings from the mugs and bottles that had been served there probably since before she was born. Bea gave the table a dark look as if it had committed some personal offense.

“Holy crap, Bea,” said Jackie. “I remember when you’d drive two hours just to get to a party and now walking ten minutes is like the worst thing you could think of doing. What gives?”

Bea gave a whole-body sigh, her shoulders slumping. “It’s… nothing. I’m sorry, Jackie. I’m being a complete pill.”

“Is it the karaoke?”

“No. God. Let’s just not talk about this and let’s, I don’t know, do what people do at karaoke that isn’t singing?”

They looked up at the stage as people applauded and whooped around them. The guy took a shy little bow before putting the microphone back on its stand. He stepped down. Jackie and Bea watched for the next brave soul. Three men, it turned out. College aged and too obviously drunk for so early in the evening. They crowded around the monitor searching for their song.

Jackie cupped her hands to her mouth and let out a loud _whoop_ that rose over the scattered applause and cheering.

“Goddamn, Jackie,” Bea said.

“What? You gotta show your support.”

Bea wanted to hide her head in her hands but that would just draw more attention. She buried her nose in the drinks menu and when a waitress came around they gave her their orders. A local beer for Jackie, lime Fiascola for Bea.

Their drinks came as the bros reached the chorus of their song, leaning precariously against one another like the ricketiest Stonehenge. Jackie looked at her mug of golden, bubbling liquid, then flicked her eyes to Bea’s soda bottle. She smiled. Bea felt a frown pass over her face.

“It’s not like I actively seek the least amount of fun,” Bea said, her voice testy. “I never got around to liking beer.”

“It’s an acquired —”

“Yes, yes, an acquired taste and I never got around to acquiring it. I was… busy.” _Making sure my shit life didn’t fall apart. Fat lot of good that did,_ she added silently. _Probably could have gone on insane benders every other night and it would have landed me in the same place my stone cold sobriety did._

“Life sucks,” she said aloud and picked up her soda, pouring it into a glass.

“Drink to that,” said Jackie. They toasted.

“And it’s not like I hate karaoke!” Bea said, slamming the glass back on the table after taking a gulp. “I just have a bad case of sympathetic cringe. You put a person up in a spotlight and have them act like a fool… that’s not funny! It’s not entertainment! It’s humiliation and awkwardness! Makes me want to crawl up into my own skull like a hermit crab.”

“It’s not _supposed_ to be humiliating, Bea,” Jackie said. “It’s…” She held her hands out in front of her and flexed them as if she could grab the words out of thin air. Then the trio on stage ended their song to applause and cheers and Jackie joined in. Once the noise died down she turned her attention back to Bea.

“Okay, so first of all it’s bad form to hold a conversation while somebody is singing so let’s get that out of the way. Look, it’s… solidarity, right?” Jackie said. “Somebody gets themselves up on stage and sure, there’s maybe a little liquid courage involved, but they’re still putting themselves out there. And yeah, it can be mortifying. That’s what the audience is here for.”

“To make it awful?”

“To make it better. To cheer them on and let them know they’re not alone up on stage. When you’re out of your comfort zone it’s good to know there are people who want you to do your best. Courage is easier to come by when you know it’s not just you. A round of applause can be just what you need, regardless of how well you did.”

“So we’re a support group.”

“Exactly! Nobody here is a celebrity or a professional. We’re all garbage slob peasants and most of us are drunkards. I can’t think of any other performance event where the _hoi polloi_ are put in control of the stage like this. You say the spotlight of karaoke is a focal point of humiliation but I say it’s the great equalizer. No superstar performing in an arena space deserves applause as much as some regular schmoe putting themselves under that kind of scrutiny after a hard day’s work.”

“One day you’re going to not relate a mundane event to egalitarian ideology,” said Bea.

“Not only is that impossible it’s also a contradiction. Now shut up and give the next person your undivided attention.”

That was a thing with Jackie. Everything she did, she did with a single-minded, laser focus. That included her social life. When she went out in search of fun it was with a specific idea in mind that brooked no deviation.

The evening went on and was unexpectedly pleasant. The karaoke lent a rhythm to their conversation; lulls when a performance was ongoing and bursts of back and forth in between. Bea got into the encouragement in a way she hadn’t expected. She was well aware that she had a contrary streak and was all set to have a terrible night mostly out of spite. But there was an undeniable energy. It was the push and pull of the crowd and the stage. It was tidal.

So she joined Jackie and cheered at each new performer, shouted encouragement and commiserations for the ones who bombed, cupped her hands to her mouth and whooped for the ones that killed it. Time passed. Bea rested one elbow on the table, her chin in her hand and she took in the ambiance with a slightly hazy smile. The lingering cigarette smoke, the sickly-sweet smell of alcohol, the press and murmur of the crowd and the thump of shoes on aged wood. After another singer stepped down, Jackie took the soda bottle from Bea and sniffed at it.

“What?” said Bea.

“Just making sure this isn’t spiked. You are way too relaxed for someone who hasn’t been drinking.”

Bea rolled her eyes. “Shut up. I’m supposed to be unwinding, right? I’m doing it. I am unwinding. I am visualizing my entire brain right now as a giant machine. You know, the kind from cartoons. Big metal gray box with belts and cogs and pistons and other junk. And there’s a big red button that says ‘chill the shit out’ and I’m pushing it. I had to break a sheet of glass with a tiny hammer to get to the button but I did.”

“That’s definitely how a normal human person relaxes. Well done, Bea.”

“Mhm.”

“So, what song do you —”

“Not a chance in hell, Jackie,” Bea said.

“Can’t blame a girl for trying.”

“I can, I will, I have.”

Jackie made an exasperated sound, then Bea saw her eyes widen behind the glare of her thick glasses and she smiled. “Oh, I know her! Up on the stage! I mean, I don’t _know_ her know her, but she’s a regular.”

A woman with short, spiky brown hair wearing a baggy pink hoodie scooped up the microphone and scrolled through the songs. The expression on her round face was sleepy but her fingers moved deftly over the remote control, clearly having a selection in mind.

“Is she good?” said Bea.

“It’s not about how good you are,” said Jackie. “It’s about how _committed_ you are.”

“I think the most I can commit to now is sitting here with my eyes open.”

“I guess I’ll take what I can get.” Jackie laid her hands flat on the table and leaned forward. “So. How are you doing, Bea?”

Bea leaned back and crossed her arms. “Really? A heart-to-heart? We’re doing this?”

“It’s either this or sing, Bea.”

“I’ve got an idea. _you_ go up there.”

“I have a rule. I never sing unless my friends are up there singing with me.”

It probably shouldn’t have shocked Bea into silence, the idea that Jackie had other friends and they actually do things. And here she was being the worst to socialize with.

“It’s rude to talk during a performance,” she said, and shifted her body, angling it to the woman on stage. This seemed to work. Jackie fell silent, inclining her head to the stage. Bea idly wondered about the set up for the sound and lighting. Her very brief and not-entirely-unenjoyable-if-she-were-forced-to-admit-it-under-threat-of-torture stint as technician for the Glass Factory’s music night left her thinking about that kind of thing more often. Most likely it was all running off some old DVD-player with a disk full of songs and she wondered what could be done to update it. What even was karaoke technology in the 21st century? You could probably stream it all off some bootleg site and not pay a penny towards the bulky old specialized machines she vaguely recalled at bowling alley pizza-fueled girl scout parties from her youth. Did the entire industry get snuffed out like other technological relics? Like tape decks and beepers and phones that had entire keyboards crammed into them and CD players that you were meant to carry in the pocket of your absurdly baggy jeans.

If her thoughts drifted like a lazy canoe in a slow current, it was abruptly swept away by the sonic tsunami of the woman on stage singing something bright and pop-ish and loud. It was something meant to be fierce and liberating about how a person can be brave like a lion or brilliant like a comet or deep like an ocean. And she committed to it, Bea had to admit, but the song soured her. Bea did not feel brave or brilliant or deep at the moment. Most days she felt like she wanted to stand on something tall, scream until her face went purple and her lungs collapsed, then find something heavy and swing it at someone’s head; a stranger’s or her own, depending on her mood. Lions and comets and oceans did not have those kinds of thoughts, she was sure.

One day, she would like to sit down and have a really good think about when exactly she became lame. She felt if she could pinpoint that it would really put things in perspective for her. Not in a way that would help her turn her life around, but allow her a renewed appreciation of her myriad screw ups. Like a person browsing an art gallery and finding a particular piece that makes them rock back on their heels and raise their eyebrows while making a thoughtful “hm” sound.

The song ended followed by a round of applause and cheers. Jackie joined in, but in a perfunctory way. She looked at Bea with a frown. “We’re going to one of the booths.”

“I thought you wanted to watch?” said Bea.

“This isn’t working.”

Bea was stubborn. She knew this. A part of her wanted to stay right where she sat and refuse to budge no matter how much of a weird adult child it might make her look. _Working,_ Jackie said. Like she had some great plan. Which, of course she did. Jackie believed in plans. Believed in goals and objectives. Even when she was supposed to be having a night out, she did so with an end in mind. Bea knew right from the beginning that this particular night was meant to be a “crack Bea out of her stupid obstinate shell” night. And again a part of her wanted to dig her heels in. Grow the shell thicker. Shut Jackie out because what business was it of hers if Bea wanted to be awful and lame and sad?

Bea was crashing on her couch, so actually it really was Jackie’s business. That was enough to get her moving. It was only a matter of time before she’d have to face the music.

She followed, slouching, her tall frame bowed, her hands in her pockets, lips pursed as if she had a cigarette in her mouth. Jackie slid into a booth, beer still in hand and Bea was regretting not bringing her own drink if only to use as a prop. Once ensconced within the booth Bea found herself wishing she were back at the karaoke. Oh, how fate twists so cruelly.

“You’re miserable, Bea,” said Jackie.

“I had not noticed, thank you for bringing this to my attention. Surely now I’ll be making the appropriate corrections to rectify this appalling state of affairs.” The sarcasm was easy, rolling out of her mouth as if it were on automatic. Judging by Jackie’s flat stare, it was also fully expected and ignored.

Jackie took a deep breath. “Okay. Let me preface this by saying no, I do not want you to move out. You idiot. I am saying this as a friend. Who is concerned. And that I realize you are in a bad place. And that you need time and space to heal. And that you can actually, genuinely, take as long as you need to and no I am not tired of you living with me and this is not me trying to chase you out of my apartment and that you can skip over denying all this because you were definitely thinking it. That is not what this is.”

She waited. Bea crossed her arms again. “Okay,” she said after a moment. “What is what this is?”

“This is me being concerned and caring about you.”

A normal person would probably be touched or whatever at this outpouring of concern. Bea knew this, but with each new word Jackie spoke she wanted to retreat to some inner part of herself where she wouldn’t have to hear all this because it was actually kind of alarming. Like there was some crossed wires in her brain so that when she heard expressions of concern it triggered the exact opposite reaction in her.

She wanted to say something like, _what are you, my mom?_ and she couldn’t. Stupid goddamn personal tragedy getting in the way of an angry retort.

Finally she decided to give in. If only so that Jackie would stop saying such distressing things like _care_. What an awful word.

“Look, I appreciate the, uh, the sentiment,” Bea said. “I’m sorry that you’re, like, worried?” She did not know how to do this at all and it was showing. “I’m just… uh.” _Completely and thoroughly lost_.

It was a minor miracle that Jackie seemed to pick up on how uncomfortable she was making Bea with this naked outpouring of sincerity, and another one when she readjusted her approach. She mirrored Bea’s posture, arms crossed and leaning away. “You have been absolutely no fun at all and it’s getting annoying,” she said with an arch tone.

Bea almost laughed in relief. Antagonism! She could deal with antagonism. How did people even communicate with each other when they weren’t trading rhetorical barbs that bounced off emotional armor? Bea didn’t know and she hoped she would never have to find out.

“Well, you know how it is,” she said with a breathless ease. “One tends to put frivolities by the wayside once one takes on responsibilities of great import.” She made an exaggerated show of examining her nails, one eyebrow raised in critical inspection. “Wouldn’t expect you to understand, but no judgment on my part. One must know the value of discretion.”

Jackie scoffed. “Oh, I’m a hedonistic lush in comparison to you, I’m sure.”

“From your lips, Jackie. But if I must concede anything I suppose I haven’t been… very… whatever. Since I came to Old Harbor.”

“You haven’t _allowed_ yourself to be ‘very whatever,’ there’s a difference between keeping to yourself and wallowing in self-loathing.”

“Oh, there’s just so much to loath though.”

“Bea…” Jackie said with warning in her voice.

“You know, it’s really kind of stifling the way you jump down my throat for indulging in a little self-deprecation every once in a while.”

“Only a little?”

“So maybe I’ve built up a tolerance over the years and need to engage in it a bit more to chase the same high, I’ve got it under control.”

“You are, like, a parody of the type of person you are,” said Jackie. “Look, forget all that. I’m just… you should meet people! Talk to people! I know you’re miserable, but if you just work and sleep, yeah, of course! I’m not saying you have to be, I don’t know, outgoing. Just… allow yourself the chance?”

“I talk to people!” said Bea.

“Talking to your boss about work does not count.”

“Shows what you know,” Bea said with triumph so out of proportion that even as she spoke another part of her wanted to die. “Just yesterday I talked to a total stranger and we had a very nice conversation.”

Jackie gave her a flat look and silently mouthed _wow_.

Bea slumped onto the table. “Okay. That was pathetic.”

She heard fabric sliding over wood as Jackie leaned her elbows onto the table. “Were they cute?”

“God, Jackie.”

“What?”

“I mean, yeah, I guess he was nice but —”

“Oooo, do go on.”

“I was until you interrupted me. But, one: he is definitely not interested in women —”

“Oh, ah well. Did he say so?”

“I could tell. And two, _I_ am definitely not interested in a relationship. Yet.”

“Why not?”

“Because I live on a couch?”

“So things aren’t ideal right now, what, you gonna wait until life is perfect? You’ll be waiting forever.”

“God. Dammit. Jackie.”

“I mean as long as you text me before you invite anyone over. Wouldn’t want to walk in on —”

“No. Not a conversation we are having.”

Jackie held her hands up in silent surrender, though she rolled her eyes as she did so and Bea knew this wasn’t the last she’d hear of this and it was so awful. After that particularly mortifying exchange Bea found herself more willing to talk about work. It took up so much space in her head lately that she really couldn’t think of any other topic to jump on and she found she had Things To Say on the subject. Like how the Janitor probably lived in the basement of the Glass Factory, or that the basement corridors were probably going to cause the whole place to collapse in on itself and slide into the harbor one day, or that the Black Goat was a giant time-bomb, the artists had no idea the kind of work Bea had to do just to make sure that toxic gasses from a single airbrush studio didn’t flood the vents and kill them all. Then Bea started talking about whatever insane hobo had taken up residence in the Black Goat’s chamber and left his stuff lying around.

“It’s the only thing that makes sense!” she said. “Like, it’s warm in there and we’re getting closer to winter.”

Jackie seemed to give this serious thought. “Sure, I could see that happening. Though the junk you’re talking about doesn’t sound like your standard bindle-stuffer. Not many carry around lawn gnomes.”

“That just proves that he’s got some kind of issue going on.”

“Ever since they shut down the local mental care facility that’s become a distinct possibility. What’d your weird Janitor guy say when you told him?”

“After I showed him the boiler room he just, like, said ‘ain’t that always the way?’” Bea said, speaking in an affected accent. “Then he picked everything up and put it in the lost-and-found shelf at the visitor kiosk.”

“You are the only person on Earth who uses the word ‘kiosk’ in conversation. Why are you so hung up about this anyway? Sure it’s odd, but —”

“Because!” Bea said with more emotion than she had intended. She felt too scattered to articulate, but… but _because_. “Like this is something I’m just supposed to accept? That’s it’s normal? No! No it is not ‘always the way’ and I don’t get how he can be so casual about trespassing like that in such a sensitive part of the building!” These weren’t the right words, but they were the words she had immediately at hand.

“Hm. Well, if you do run into whoever did that, give them my card. We’ve still got space at the shelter.” Jackie had given Bea a stack of cards at some point after her arrival in Old Harbor. That and anti-turnUP stickers and other accoutrements of the civic-minded Harbor activist set. Bea had yet to approach random homeless people to give them cards. She imagined it would be something of a disappointment to them.

After a moment of silence where Bea stared moodily at the knots and whorls of their table, she propped her chin up in one hand that leaned on the table. Though the shadows were deep in the grungy bar, there was light enough for the edges of a smile to show on her face. Her body shuddered.

“What’s so funny?” Jackie said.

“I possibly have the only friend in Old Harbor or perhaps the entire seaboard who, after I tell her about the creepy experience I had in the workplace, turns it into an outreach effort to a likely mentally-ill hobo.”

Jackie tilted her head to one side. “I’m sorry, Bea. I don’t mean to make this into a —”

“It’s not — You don’t have to apologize. Really. It’s just…” Her eyelids felt heavy and her eyes were unfocused and far away, staring into some distant devastation that only she could see, a wasteland in the mind’s eye. “We live in an awful world, don’t we?”

Jackie lifted her glass up in toast. “One of the worst.”

Bea snorted through her nose in a rueful laugh. Before she could add anything else, a commotion from the bar grabbed their attention. She and Jackie craned their heads to see the bartender, a large and sweaty man, engaged in a heated conversation with two scrawny younger men wearing tweedy clothes that stood out amid the background of working-class garb.

“Stop shoving your goddamn phone in my face and get the hell out of here! I told you that garbage is no good here!”

One of the younger men with said phone in said face continued waving it around. “Look, man, it’s untraceable, untaxable currency that’s secure and not subject to the whims of government-imposed, fiat —”

The bartender cut him off and gripped his bar so hard Bea could see his knuckles whiten. “We don’t accept it, we never _will_ accept it, get that shit out of my sight before I _feed_ it to you, you dumb kid.”

The second young man huffed. “This is going in our online review. Come on, dude. This place is full of dinosaurs. Your shit’s gonna get bulldozed, dude!” Saying the last bit to the bartender, the two left amid a scattering of jeers directed at them from the other customers.

“No wonder this place is dying. They don’t understand cryptocurrency blockchains at _all_ here,” Bea heard one of them say as they passed by the booth.

She shook her head. “We live in the lamest of all possible worlds.”

“Yeah,” said Jackie. “But as long as places like this are throwing out people like that, there’s still good in it.”

~~~

They stayed until the karaoke took on a more intoxicated air. The passage of time and drinks made the participants into stumbling, slurring displays and the audience grew more subdued. The sounds they made took on a sharper edge that made Bea’s head ache. Jackie took that as their cue to leave.

They came back late. On a normal night Bea would have been fast asleep by now. She went to the couch with a headache and she almost resented not having drank anything. At least if she did she’d have an excuse for the pain beyond “does not do well with crowds.”

And when she woke up 45 minutes past when she was supposed to clock in that morning, she’d have an excuse beyond “apparently being just the slightest bit late to bed makes it impossible for me to wake up on time, because I’m clearly a child.”

She was a sleepy whirlwind, rushing through the apartment in a frenzy of activity and cursing. She nearly choked on a slice of dry bread she was eating while pulling her shirt over her head and tripped on her own pants, skinning a knee on the carpet. No time to fool with her hair, she tied it into a single tight and messy bun. By the time she was out the door she seriously considered walking towards the river and not stopping until it was over her head.

She didn’t run so much as speed walk because by then she was late enough that the few minutes she might _might_ shave off was simply not worth it. So she stomped down the sidewalk practically chewing on a cigarette wondering if she’d get fired on the spot or if they need extra time to process the paperwork or whatever. Even when she was running her (father’s) store she was never late. Late was lazy and she was never, ever that. Whatever else she was, she knew that much about herself. She worked _hard_.

Showing up an hour late, skipping the elevator for the stairwell, she jumped over every other stair just to get down sooner. She felt the impact in the soles of her feet and derived a weird kind of thrill from the shock. She went into the sub-basement tool shed and there was the Janitor, feet kicked up on the table watching the sports channel replaying the highlights of some game or other. Time to face the music.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said, breathlessly. “I, uh, had a rough night.”

The Janitor looked up from the television, bushy eyebrows not even raised in any kind of surprise or recrimination or ire. “Hm? ‘S fine. Got a gas leak report. Pottery kiln in studio 114. Valve’s closed, so switch out the gaskets and hoses. Should be good.”

“Uh. Okay, yeah, sure. Sorry, should’ve gotten to it sooner but…” Bea waved her hand around helplessly in a _you know how it is_ sort of way. She didn’t know why she kept apologizing. She felt this need to make him acknowledge that she was late. That she did wrong. That there should be consequences.

Instead, he shrugged. “Ain’t that the way. Wouldn’t worry about it much. Oh, by the way.” He pawed at the desk, pulling open a drawer and bringing out a tangle of keys that jangled. “Here.”

He tossed it Bea’s way and she caught it clumsily. “What?”

“Keys to the building. Shoulda had keys earlier, but didn’t.”

And that was that.

Which struck Bea as wrong. Really wrong. There should be consequences for actions. It wasn’t that she wanted her life to get torpedoed by sudden unemployment, that would actually be genuinely catastrophic. But rules exist for a reason and when they get violated the world shouldn’t move blithely on. Otherwise what was the point of having them?

She made herself work an hour late to make up for time missed. Even though it seemed nobody would care if she left at her usual time. It mattered to her. The Earth was not about to spin out of orbit because she missed an hour, but she’d still feel like something crucial had been flung from her own personal axis if she didn’t try to balance out one of the very few things she had control over in her life. She felt so strongly about this that she didn’t realize that at no point in the day did the Janitor tell her to go down and check on the Black Goat. And when she went down to the shed, he was the one who signed off on the checklist for the furnace. Bea didn’t know what to feel about that, so she kept herself out of the basement, doing chores on the ground floor.

And whenever her path took her close by, she’d drift over to the visitor’s kiosk with all its brochures and such and look underneath at the lost-and-found shelf. Nobody actually manned the kiosk. Only volunteers did for special events and shows. On one of her visits, a patron mistook Bea for a volunteer and asked where the gift shop was. Which was absurd because if there was one thing the Glass Factory absolutely did not want anyone to be confused about, it was the location of the gift shop. Bea could see five different signs for it in her immediate line of view as she directed the patron. Some people.

Bea went to the kiosk because she had to make sure the fishing pole and badminton racket and lawn gnome and the other assorted junk hauled out of the boiler room was still there. Because Jackie didn’t give a shit and the Janitor didn’t give a shit and she refused to accept that this was just some normal, okay thing to have happen to her.

Obsession wasn’t a word that popped up in her head even as she physically held the lawn gnome in both hands just so its tactile reality could stave off fears this is all a weird illusion. The word did not enter her head because she could be exceptionally good at denial when she wanted to be.

It was just…

This weird uncanny inexplicable yet also utterly mundane _thing_ happened. It happened in the catacombs of the factory. Somewhere along the line she had convinced herself that, in some ill-defined way, that place belonged to her. It had become her little maze of corridors. Aside from the Janitor, nobody else seemed to use them. Sure, nobody ever put up a sign that said “Beatrice Santello Only”(not that she’d trust anyone in this place to get her name right. She tried to get the supply office to correct her name tag and she got a new one that read BEAN SANTELLO), but she had come to assume in some unthinking way that the place basically belonged to her.

So to have someone defile it with garbage had shaken her more than she let on. She had so little in her life that she could feel comfortable with. In a silly way she had decided that the catacombs with the mildew smell and weird nightmare furnace was a sort of refuge. She shocked herself by realizing that she had even missed going down there. Which was insane. She knew there was a difference between doing something she actually enjoyed and doing something because it was familiar, but the feeling did not go away.

Which made the lawn gnome into a kind of proxy for this weirdo who messed it all up for her. Which was why she had her hands around its neck. As if she could throttle it and in turn the jerk who left it there. Which was how she was found by a woman who had been trying to get her attention for nearly half a minute.

“I said helloooooooooooooo! Hey!”

Bea looked up from over the kiosk. Her eyes were wide and still a little bloodshot. Her hair was falling out of its bun. Her mouth was slack, opened in surprise. And she was still gripping the gnome around its fat dumb glazed ceramic neck. She was, in short, a sight.

“The gift shop is around the corner to the left!” she snapped.

“Whoa, okay, that’s… I know that. What the hell? Who wants to know about gift shops? They’re so garbage.”

Bea took a breath, closed her eyes, then opened them again to get a better look at the person in front of her.

First impression: she was stocky and short. Real short. Like puberty had abandoned this project early. Like Bea should get on the public address system and ask if anyone had misplaced their child. Okay, maybe not _that_ short, but a near thing nonetheless. She had short black hair with tips dyed pink. She had bags under her eyes and a sweaty pasty pallor to her skin, like sleeping well was not a thing she did on the regular. Which wasn’t a look Bea was unfamiliar with, if she were brutally honest about the times she looked at herself in the mirror.

“Did you… need something?” Bea said. One good thing she could say about this job was that customer service wasn’t a big focus. She got work orders, she completed work orders. It did mean that she was a little rusty when interacting with a human person did come up, though.

“Do you work here?” said the short girl. Woman? She could be Bea’s age. Hard to judge.

“I do work here.”

“Only you don’t seem like the type.” 

Bea removed one hand from the gnome and pointed at her name tag because that was proof, probably.

The woman squinted and leaned forward. “Bean?”

A wave of exasperation passed over Bea, threatening to tug her to the ground with its riptide current. “I’m sorry, was there something I could, uh, help you with?” If this conversation lasted much longer she’d probably curl up on the floor.

“Yeah. Bean. Could you give me back my gnome?”

Bea’s breath caught in her throat. “Your what.” The kiosk was right at the entrance to the Glass Factory, big glass doors to the outside in front of them, the expanse of the building itself behind them. This was not the place for a scene, so she resisted reaching into her pocket, spraying mace into this person’s eyes and demanding why they had to derail Bea’s miserable life with something confusing and weird.

“I mean. This is the lost and found, right? So, I lost it, you found it, it’s a dance as old as the cosmos.”

Bea glared. “I’m going to need some way to verify this is your… lawn ornament.”

“My name is Mae Borowski.”

“Unless you wrote your name on this thing, that doesn’t really help.”

Mae cast her eyes skyward. “Well I don’t know how to prove he’s mine!”

“Maybe you can describe where you left it last.”

“ _Professor_ Lucius von Gnomeo was brought in as a consultant for a very delicate procedure I was performing.”

 _I shouldn’t have to put up with this,_ Bea thought. _If I showed up on time I would have left on time and this awful person would not be here saying ridiculous things at me. I may have never found out who was responsible for vandalizing the boiler room but maybe some mysteries are not worth solving._

“I’m calling the cops,” said Bea.

“For what?”

“Trespassing. You were in the employees only area when you lost this and you’re definitely not an employee.”

“Jokes on you, jerk! I do work here.”

It was part judgment call, part bluff, but Bea immediately responded. “No. You don’t.”

“Yeah, I have a studio.”

“You. You are an art student? _You?_ ”

“What the hell kind of tone is that? I’m artistic as shit!”

This was getting worse by the second. Bea needed to not be here. Not talk to this person. She wanted to shove the stupid gnome into this stupid girl’s hands and walk out and just… not do this.

“What exactly do you do, artistically? Leave a mess that someone else has to clean up?” She said. She wanted to do all those things but she still stood there and poked and prodded. Like there was something stuck between her teeth she couldn’t leave alone.

“That was… that was not my art! If you must know, I was performing a service by fixing the furnace!”

“It’s a boiler.”

“What?”

“It’s a boiler, not a furnace,” said Bea.

“God, what even is the difference?”

“A boiler uses hot water.” Bea said. “A furnace uses hot air.”

“Well boilers sound really lame. If you have hot water that means you already have hot air! That’s like, a whole other step.”

“You didn’t even know what it was and you thought you could… fix it? How?”

Mae put her hands on her hips and had a look on her face like she was being asked to explain something very simple and obvious. “Well, the racket would, like, dissipate the heat. The fishing pole was there to hold the pipes together. No, wait, the racket was to plug a hole. I think. No that was the fishing pole. Wait.” Mae’s face scrunched up in thought. “Wasn’t… why did I put that fishing pole there? Okay, the fan was to… turn something.”

The urge to run away warred again with the urge to stay and learn more about this awful mess. “And the gnome?” Bea said after the latter won out.

“I don’t even know anymore.”

Bea barked out a short, harsh laugh. “Great! Ha ha! You’re an idiot.” She pushed the gnome into Mae’s chest. Mae caught it in her arms. “All your garbage is here. You go grab it. I shouldn’t even be here this late. Stay out of the employee areas. You do _not_ work here. You just rent studio space. So do me a favor and never go anywhere ever again. Good-bye.”

It was all so terribly typical. Here Bea was, imagining any number of awful scenarios that might explain what had happened down in the boiler and in the end the answer turned out to be a bored college student with more time on her hands than sense in her head. The disappointment couldn’t be avoided, even if it could be argued that Bea should be grateful it wasn’t an ax murderer or something. All mystery had been dispelled, and the answer was disappointing. The last thing she needed in her life was some art student who decided to be “quirky.” 

Mae might have been saying something as Bea walked away, but she wasn’t listening. Life was a farce, fear gave way to inanity, the disguised killer lifting their mask to reveal the pitiable clown. Bea couldn’t help but feel disappointment. She couldn’t even work up any indignation and she walked out the door alternately laughing and feeling intensely embarrassed for herself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it's not fanfiction if it doesn't have karaoke


	4. In Ibon's Shadow

As the years went by and Old Harbor faded further and further into memory, Bea could still think back and remember the incident with the puppets. 

The salient moments — the old man with his terrorist conspiracies, the chase across the docks, the vivid sound of screams and wood crashing down, the first time she saw _that look_ in Mae’s eyes — would yield to Bea’s unflinching recall. But as for how it began, she would have to think on it.

Then she would conclude that it began with a question.

~~~

“You interested in more hours?”

Bea did not respond immediately, committed to completing a work order report. They were clearing out two vacant studios, merging them into one and equipping the large space in a very specific way. It was a multi-day job and Bea had been on it for most of her shift. Once she reported all completed tasks she clicked her pen, then looked at the Janitor.

“Like, in general or…”

“Comedy night tomorrow,” he said. “Need someone to work the lights and sound. Gonna need you to stay the length of the show, using the board and the computer.”

She tilted her head in thought. That was meant to be a day off for her. Well, one of the benefits of having no life was she could devote more hours to a job that paid a pittance for labor. Suck it, life. “Okay, yeah,” said Bea. At least she’d be sitting down.

“Settles that, then.” The Janitor rotated one of his shoulders, making a sound like marbles clicking against each other. “October’s a busy month. All the way up to the end of the year, really. Holidays and all. But Halloween is coming soon.”

“Yeah?”

“Mhm. We get trick or treaters. Kids. We set this place up, the whole docks, so that them kids can run around at night. Even get families coming in from Bright Harbor. Studios giving out candy and the sort. Face painting and whatnot. Pictures of ghosts, or something of that nature. It’s an all hands on deck kind of situation. Running booths or doing security. Overtime pay and all.”

“You had me at ‘overtime,’” said Bea. She could work well with… children. Actually, no. But for overtime and an opportunity to duck out of her self-loathing sessions on Jackie’s couch, she could _pretend_ to work well with children.

“Well alright,” said the Janitor. “Come in tomorrow round about 3 in the afternoon. That’ll give you time to set up. Check on the Goat and you can roll out for the day.”

“Okay,” said Bea.

~~~

It still smelled faintly of garbage and mildew but it was nice to be in the catacombs again. The inexplicably moist walls, the rattling pipes, the flickering lights, the grit under Bea’s boots. It was a physical expression of decay and calamity and it made Bea want to wrap herself up in her own arms and shiver against an imperceptible wind. It was something both ruined and vital. If the Glass Factory could be likened to a tree then these dark halls is where the nourishing soil was, and what was soil other than a mix of mineral and decomposing organic matter? The intermingling of non-living and unliving. And above, the life that it created. Life that was largely oblivious to what lay below, like it was Bea’s little secret. It gave her a small thrill. 

In the boiler room, The Black Goat rumbled and whined like a cornered animal. The looping network of pipes wrapped around it like constraints, adding to the impression of a thing trapped, danger restrained, energy contained. Which, ultimately, was a primary function of a boiler. Bea mentally scolded her own vivid imaginings. Why were images of a feral animal kept in captivity prowling her headspace when this was all perfectly normal for a boiler? Perhaps however comfortable she felt in here she could never truly be at ease.

All the same, when Mae had junked up the boiler room, it had felt like an invasion. Bea could never get anyone to understand. When she had explained it to Jackie she saw that glassy look, the lack of comprehension. Her own frustration at not being heard even as she was listened to. Quite likely she would never have gotten any resolution on the thing if Mae herself hadn’t popped up out of nowhere and taken credit for what she had done. On a certain level, this frustrated Bea. It was like the random collision of particles resulting in some unforeseen chemical reaction. Things shouldn’t happen without rhyme or reason. Patterns shouldn’t be disrupted by random happenstance.

The morning after she had her encounter with Mae, Bea had done some research. The directory of artists was available to her, so it wasn’t hard to look Mae up. Not having caught the last name, knowing it only sounded long and vaguely Eastern European, Bea scanned the registry.

_Borowski, Margaret. Studio 172. Medium: Ink and Paper. Occupation: Student_

Borowski. That sounded right. Was ‘Mae’ short for ‘Margaret?’ It wasn’t something Bea had run across personally but whatever, she wasn’t the Prime Minister of Nicknames.

So this was an actual student with an actual studio. 172. That was in the really crappy end of the factory. First floor, about as far from the entrance as you could get. The walls had been built thick there, and a lot of the building’s aging utilities were exposed above ground, resulting in smaller studios and cramped corridors sharing space with groaning pipes. Tourists, if they went that way, tended to move through without stopping, pushed by the ones behind them. They’d do a loop and end up back in the main space of the factory.

None of which meant anything to Bea. These were all facts that pertained to a life that had nothing to do with her. And that, she realized, was how it was going to end. This was all just A Weird Thing That Happened. No rhyme, no reason. The random collision of particles and now they spun merrily away from each other and all of Creation could do nothing but shrug. Which meant all Bea could do was shrug. It also made her want to bunch one hand up into a fist, find some way to punch the senselessness of it all.

The care and maintenance of the Black Goat was involved. Mostly it involved a list. It had gotten to the point where she could nearly follow it from memory, though she still kept a physical copy with her just in case. It was easy to overlook a step because the actions the list demanded were mostly nonsensical. Plus, there were handwritten notes to consider. Written into the margins, scratchy from multiple photocopies and in a variety of writing styles as if multiple workers over generations had contributed to the checklist.

With a flathead screwdriver, she calibrated the temperature gauge all the way up. Then halfway down. Up again. Then back to its original position, somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters, which was marked out by a little dab of white paint on the glass.

“I can’t believe I do this,” Bea said. That was another thing. She had developed the habit of talking to the Black Goat. Which, obviously, was totally healthy and normal and not at all deranged. She tapped a pipe with her wrench (third pipe from the left when entering the room) exactly 11 times (tap harder on every odd number. That particular direction had been underlined by a frantic, shaky hand and the pen trailed off the edge of the paper).

“I mean, at least I get paid.” She unscrewed a pressure meter and opened its housing. Behind the gauge was the amber husk of a dead cockroach, its exoskeleton rattling against the metal. Bea took it out and put it in a container hanging from her toolbelt. Then she opened a different container and, with a pair of tweezers, plucked another cockroach corpse from a small pile and gingerly placed it inside of the meter. She closed the housing and fixed it back in place.

“Can’t say it’s preparing me for any kind of future.” She looked at her list for the next step. It told her that above the lowest vent was a symbol made in erasable marker. The very symbol she had drawn on in her previous shift, in fact. She was to swab it clear with a cloth on top of boiler. “How would this even look on a resume?" Using her marker, she redrew the symbol: an eight-point sunburst with four of the points on the upper-left side drawn thicker than the others. She returned the cloth to the top of the boiler where it had been stashed. “NEVER EVER REMOVE CLOTH FROM ROOM,” the list said with multiple underlines once again.

“HR looks at my work experience, it reads ‘molested an antiquated industrial utility’ on it. HR moves on,” said Bea. She undid the wing nut bolts that held a clamp around a pipe, then transferred the whole nut and clamp assembly to the nearest pipe on the right. Tomorrow she would put it back on the pipe to the left. She did not know what this accomplished, if anything.

“Would it be better if I mentioned that I talk to the equipment? Out loud?” Hammer to the side of the boiler. It rang, low and ominous. It gurgled like it was hungry. Sound was… strange… in the boiler room. It was part of the reason why she had taken up the habit of talking aloud. It helped to cover up the way ringing metal seemed so small for a place this size. She tried not to be concerned about it. Bea liked to think of herself as a flinty-eyed realist, ignoring those times she’d lie awake fantasizing fervently about a better life in hopes that such thoughts would color her dreams. People were allowed to let the mask slip when they slept.

But here and now she was on the clock and Bea was sensible. There was probably some acoustical quirk that accounted for the way sound worked. The building was old and the basement was full of winding hallways. Any explanation probably took those points into account and explained why it sounded like she was in a cavern of unfathomable depths and not a boiler room. There was no place for flights of fancy at work. There was only room for Fixing Shit. Even if fixing shit meant… Bea glanced down at her checklist… “checking the carbon monoxide detector _without looking directly at the detector_.” God, no, okay this was actually stupid. She checked her pockets. The Janitor had given her a mirror for precisely this task, so where…

Bea sighed. If it wasn’t with her it was in her locker. She was always transferring stuff from her pockets to her locker and vice-versa and it was inevitable something would get lost in the shuffle. This meant she’d have to leave then come back right when she should be clocking out. What if she just checked it off the list and pretend she did it?

She stepped back and gave the Black Goat a sharp glare. This usually got people to leave her alone and why she decided that the same would apply to a machine was a question Bea was never going to answer. After giving it a sufficient amount of glare, she turned and made for the exit.

And behind her, as close as a breath on her shoulder, was the keening grind of metal moving over concrete.

The hair on the back of her neck went up and she arched her spine and caught her breath. Bea spun around. The scrape of her boots on the ground cut through the cacophony leaving her in silence once again.

This was a normal sound, Bea told herself. Metal fatigue, probably. Or… or… Bea was not entirely sure, if she were honest. Her imagination filled in the space of the unknown and all thoughts of being sensible was abandoned because she _swore_ the pipes radiating from the boiler were no longer where they were when she first walked in. She hadn’t made a point of memorizing that kind of thing but the shadows they cast were different and — 

She let out a long breath and forced herself to get a grip and tamp down the weird fight-or-flight that seized her. She stared, unblinking. The Black Goat was a mass of black, knobbly cast-iron. It was lumpy and glowering, a shadowed lurker that made Bea wonder how she could come here multiple times a day and not feel the way it was very suddenly watching her right now and — 

_Dont. Lose. Your head._

She had been clutching her list to her chest as if it were protection. When she consciously held it away from her, her eyes were drawn to the last checkbox. In the light of the sun, she would berate herself for superstitious thought, but here and now…

She fished her phone out of her pocket, turned on the camera and, once she approached the boiler, snapped a picture of the carbon monoxide detector. Or at least the general area of it, since she did her level best not to look at the thing. Once she had the picture, she looked at it and noted down the number on the checklist.

“Okay?” she said. “Happy?”

And the hair-raising alarm that permeated the air _did_ clear. Bea looked at the boiler, and it was just a boiler. The menace that obviously existed only in her head had evaporated. She scowled at her own silliness, then jabbed the final check mark onto her list.

As she left the boiler and returned to the tool shed, her eyes drifted to the list. She looked at the handwritten notes of previous workers, squeezing their observations into the margins. She took up her pen again and wrote in tight script next to the final checklist item: _don’t need a mirror, taking a picture works too._ She underlined it as an afterthought.

She handed it to the Janitor as her final task of the day. When he looked at it, his scruffy eyebrows went up as he read her addition. “Huh,” he said. “That’s good to know.”

It made Bea feel like she had contributed something.

~~~

The Glass Factory occupied prime real estate. In its previous life, freshly fired glass poured out of its furnaces to be wheeled directly onto the barges. Glass that would become part of the skyscrapers of Bright Harbor and the storefronts and windows of homes there and in places beyond. It, with the help of the waters that flowed beside it, spread itself outward through its creations.

Today, as Bea sat on a bench facing out across the river, the Glass Factory drew people inward. Even in mid-October the tourists were drawn in. The river too, once shipping manufactured products out, now ferried people in. They wandered the piers and the promenade space surrounded by the Factory and by restaurants. 

Bea usually went straight to Jackie’s after work. She could never feel at ease sitting around outdoors. It felt like squandered time. This was despite the fact she spent much of her time in Jackie’s apartment sitting around. And she knew this. _And she did it anyway._ Bea had no satisfying answer to why this was. Even as she slumped against the bench her brain whirled, chasing its own tail unraveling her own thought process until she could hardly remember how breathing worked. Was it possible to have a panic attack while sitting still doing absolutely nothing? Another question Bea couldn’t bear to answer. She just sat and tried to uncoil the tight ball of anxiety that settled in her stomach. It was always there, and the moment she clocked out of work and she no longer had to think about boilers or pliers or spray bottles full of cleaning solution it would reassert itself, weave itself into her life once more. Her awful, dumb life. No amount of hammers and screwdrivers was going to fix _that_ broken piece of crap.

A fresh breeze passed over her face. Focus on that. It felt nice to sit under the autumn sun. Focus on that. It felt nice to hear the distant rumble of boats, the lapping of the river against the pier, the seagulls screaming, the people milling. She closed her eyes and tried to relax her shoulders. Staying still didn’t sit right with her and soon she would stand up and walk to the apartment. But until then, she wanted to allow the moment to be nice.

The breeze picked up, taking up her hair which would always start falling out of its bun towards the end of her shift. She heard a dry rustling and opened her eyes. A brown plastic bag fluttered in the wind, straining against the iron gate it was snagged against. There was a lull in the air, then a sudden gust snapped the bag free. It tumbled end over end. Bea always followed the course of plastic bags in the wind. She couldn’t help it and she always found it odd that no one else did this. Was she boring? Was this boring? It was probably boring. She didn’t care. There was something captivating about it.

Bea’s eyes tracked it as it was whipped back and forth on unseen currents. Then it got caught up in a draft that lifted it up and over the river. The flutter and snap of plastic audible even as it was carried further away, litter given wings that would carry it far from this shore and to parts unknown. To Bright Harbor, maybe, if not further.

Then another draft snapped it straight down and it hurtled into the river as a gross, soggy pile. 

Pursing her lips, Bea decided that maybe it was just a piece of garbage and not some symbol of freedom. Yeah. Definitely. She stood up and left.

~~~

Dinner at Jackie’s was always informal, none of that gathering around a table and talking about your day. This was something that had come as an immense relief to Bea. She could barely hold it together when it was her, her father and the clink of silverware on plates, the too-loud slurp of water from cracked plastic cups, the silence of words unsaid. Each meal an exercise in tension so agonizing it would make the most dedicated of dramatists get up from their screenplay, run their fingers through their hair and go “no, this is too much, I can’t stand it.”

Being able to whip up her own damn sandwich and eat it in front of a laptop while Jackie fried an egg for herself was like the most decadent act of hedonism in comparison.

That was something Bea had appreciated about Jackie. As guilty as she had felt about living off of her friend’s generosity, the guilt had always been internal. Jackie never pried and never pestered. She accepted whatever Bea would allow her to know and never inquired beyond that. It was nice of her. On the other hand, where Jackie did not judge Bea sure as hell picked up the slack. Her self-recrimination, already well developed in high school, had worked itself up into a veritable whirlwind of self-flagellation since. It worked itself up at times to the point where Bea had no choice but to let the slightest bit of herself out of the mental prison she had built in her mind. 

“I’m coming in late tomorrow,” she said. “Just letting you know. So you don’t, like, send out search parties when I’m not here.” Even letting that much out felt like a concession.

Jackie looked up at her from the kitchen and considered this slight morsel of Bea’s life that she had been presented. “Holy shit, did you just say you have a social life?” 

“That’s… no. I did not say that. I didn’t even use any of those words. I’m working late.”

“Bea you have to —”

“If you’re telling me I need to get out more, I will roundhouse kick you out a window.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you raise your leg above, like, knee level.”

“Wow, go to hell.”

“So what’s going on? You covering for someone?”

“They’re having a comedy night at the Glass Factory and they want me to pitch in on the technical stuff.”

“Oh. Wow. You’re gonna work at the Laffoseum?”

“Why are you saying that like it’s a thing? How do you even know about this?”

“Bea, please. Do you seriously think I’ve lived in Old Harbor this long without having explored every bit of night life it has to offer? I’ve been everywhere from the worst Blanktones tribute band to bingo night at church to the worst orgy.”

“I’m not responding to any of those. I’m not.”

“Shut up and listen to me. You are in for the most profoundly dismal time of your life.” Jackie said this with the intonations of an oracle’s prophecy.

“Why?”

“Just the worst old jokes.” 

“Are they Dad Jokes? All the kids talk about those these days. They’re making a comeback or something.”

“The. Worst. Time of your life. When does it start? I should be off work. I’ll go watch it. They use volunteers to handle the ushering and they’re generally pretty bad about keeping people on the blacklist out of the building.”

Bea wiped her mouth with a napkin, which she folded primly and put on her plate. Then she looked at Jackie. “Jackie, don’t do anything to jeopardize my job, please.”

“You have nothing to worry about, I’m pretty sure they stopped having the _really_ racist comedians on after I threw a chair onstage. You got nothing to worry about.”

“Jackie, I’m not dropping this.”

“Yeah you are, cuz I’m not answering. This is gonna be hilarious. Now come on, since you’re not working tomorrow morning we can binge watch a show. I’m so behind and you’re probably moreso.”

~~~

The next day, Bea came to work early. She was so truly bereft of purpose, alone and pottering around Jackie’s apartment. With nothing to do prior to setting up the stage, Bea stopped by Angus’ studio where he proceeded to hold court on what turned out to be a favorite subject of his.

“I mean, the lyrics are _about_ a young bird’s first flight south with their flock, during which they get blown off course in a storm and spend the entire album finding their way back with the help of a fox that initially tried to eat the bird but became friends after they fought off a wolf together, but if you look at it in the context of its time the entire album was really a chronicle of the anti-fascist protests that took place in Great Britain during the late seventies. It’s a fairly relevant work despite its lack of intersectional perspective.”

“I still don’t see it,” said Bea. She was sitting at his table with its one monitor displaying the flickering white bars against a black field. As Angus talked she waved a magnet over the screen, watching the bars warp and turn prismatic underneath her hand.

“It’s subtext mostly,” said Angus as he wiped at the picture frames on his wall, “but it’s definitely there. It gets overt in the eighth track: ‘For Though I am Wing’d the Creatures of the Earth are My Kin.’ Which, incidentally, has the best pan flute/electric steel guitar duet ever recorded to this day.”

“I think I’ll just never get prog rock.”

“I can recommend you a really good podcast.”

“You just said, like, the worst sentence I’ve heard all day.” Bea said. Then she sighed. “Is it about anti-fascism or prog rock?”

“Which would you prefer?”

“Which requires the most explanation?”

“Okay, prog rock it is.”

“I feel like I signed up for something terrible.”

“You didn’t, it’s good. See? I’m smiling because it will be fun,” said Angus. Then he smiled.

“You’re smiling but it’s not a friendly smile.”

Angus stopped. “So what are you into?”

Bea shrugged. She leaned against Angus’ work table as he diligently cleaned his framed photographs. They were surrounded by the faint hum and static buzz of vintage electronics. She could practically feel stray strands of her hair floating in EM fields. “I just listen to whatever thing that sounds as sad as I feel at any given time, you know? I’ve got, like, an entire playlist where some dude plays three notes on a piano over the course of thirteen hours.”

“That’s… cool.”

“It’s like a process. Like, hey, let’s spend 30 minutes playing various diminished chords real slow while a raven caws in the distance. There’s no real destination in mind, it’s a journey. A journey into darkness. I mean. That’s not _all_ I listen to, but it’s definitely my current get-down.”

“Are you musical?” said Angus.

Bea looked to the side. “I mean. Not really. I used to, uh, tool around with a music program. Like, a step sequencer. I know some chords and I can put them to, like, a beat.”

“Yeah, that’s what music is.”

“I mean, I can’t play an instrument.”

Angus turned from his picture frames and gave her a wry look. “I was in choir.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. My teacher said I had a good voice for rock music. I still don’t know what he meant by that.”

“You have kind of a deep voice.” 

“Eh. I think he was thinking of a nice way to say I wasn’t really suited for choir? He also said that if a horror movie needed someone to chant gutturally in their score he’d get in touch with me.”

“Wow.”

“So you’re doing this comedy night thing now?”

“Don’t say it like that,” said Bea.

“Like what?”

“Like I was planning on going on stage. No for a million years to that. I’m just helping with, like, the sound mixer and the lights.”

“Production work, then.”

“I guess.” It felt weird to have her job described that way. She was a maintenance worker, a janitor, repairwoman. Fiddling with the computer behind the scenes felt like an extension of that because she was still fixing shit and even _plumbing_ work these days involved computers. Hearing it described as _production_ made her think that someone somewhere had goofed up somehow. She couldn’t tell if it was her, the Glass Factory or a god or gods.

“I might actually stick around, see your handiwork,” said Angus.

Bea rolled her eyes. “Yeah, you’ll really see my personal touch in the microphone mix level.”

“You never know, something exciting could happen. Comedy night needs it.”

“Is it that bad?”

Angus shifted from foot to foot, crossed his arms and tilted his head, the overhead halogen lights catching on the lenses of his glasses. “I mean. I’ve never sat through an entire night. I think doing that constitutes a violation of the Eighth Amendment. The thing is, the jokes are kind of, I feel like they’re made for space aliens who just recently came to Earth. Or really old people.”

“Yeah?”

“There’s a bunch of assisted living homes on the edge of town. They come in on big busses that take them to places in the city. Here, theaters, other places. Never the boats though. Nobody wants to be on a boat when the years of heart disease finally catches up to grandpa.”

“I bet that happened at least once.”

“Oh absolutely. Anyway, the jokes tend to be the kind that I guess are funny to people who were either way into 50s-era variety shows or 50s-era segregation.”

“Yikes.”

“We’re talking, like… do you know how, like, there used to be joke books dedicated to mocking an entire ethnic group? Or blondes?”

“God. My Dad had one of those. I read it once when I was 6 and I said something wildly inappropriate to my Mom that made her throw the book out and yell at him.”

“Yeah. You’re either in for those or, like, mother-in-law jokes.”

“That actually sounds fascinating from an anthropological perspective. I feel like I should document all this as it happens. Scholars in the future will need to know what it was like in the twilight years of a declining superpower.”

“It’s at least worth a mention in the inevitable documentary,” said Angus.

“Or at least one television feature. Like one of those neocolonialist travelogue shows where a travel writer goes to an impoverished nation to gawk in condescending admiration at the indomitable spirit of the quaint locals clinging to the bottom rung of the economic social order.”

“Heh, I can totally see that,” said Angus. Then he spoke in a prim, documentarian accent: “This Old Harbor native works 13 hours a day in the shadow of a hi-rise luxury hotel, picking up coffee cups, discarded rags and other leavings to sell as scrap at a nearby tourist’s bazaar. Their most lucrative business is done during industry convention season when the hotels are packed with high powered moguls wheeling and dealing their way to their next billion.”

Bea picked up the thread. “But once their 13 hours of work is done, they return to their alleyway communities where they dance and sing the night away accompanied by the unique musical blend of late capitalist America: retro synthwave screamo and folk-punk coffeehouse shoetrap.”

“What, no prog?” Angus said with feign hurt.

“Angus, there is no future in America where prog rock makes a comeback.”

“This truly is the dark timeline.” 

“Getting darker every day,” Bea said cheerily. She got up off the chair. It was uncomfortable and made her think of school. The Glass Factory subsisted partly on grants from the city and partly on private donations and Bea ventured a guess that the furniture — at least the ones provided by the art center to studios — were prison-made, just like school desks. “I’m gonna check out the stage they’re setting up. Should probably do my actual job.”

Angus gave her a wave. “I’ll drop by once the show starts.”

“If you like.”

~~~

The stage was integrated with the cafe that Bea had walked through on her first day. The walls that defined the cafe’s space was foldable and on rails. When it came time for a show, they were pushed away, devoting the cafe space and the floor beyond to audience seating. The stage itself was set up in the Glass Factory’s plaza. It was all basically a big kit that got put together and struck down as needed. Insert peg A into slot A kind of situation, meant for rapid assembly and disassembly. An elevated stage with a proscenium made from lightweight plywood that wouldn’t stand up to a storm but worked well enough for an enclosed space. There were curtains, but not the massive velvet from an actual theater. It was a gauzy, lightweight fabric. Sheer and threadbare, patched in places and just barely doing the job of concealing the space behind it from the audience. If it weren’t for the plumb bob weights attached to the bottom it would blow away in the slightest breeze.

A sign arched above the stage. It was interchangeable depending on whatever night it happened to be. Since tonight was comedy night, the awful Laffoseum sign with its lettering painted in a big cartoonish balloon style, was up there, held in place by little wooden pegs that Bea knew liked to wobble menacingly. But it was probably fine.

Off to the side of the stage was a booth for a director to read off stage cues, and next to that was the light and sound board hooked up to a computer. Ordinarily this would have been set far back in the audience so that whoever was at the controls could see the lights and hear the sounds from the audience’s perspective. But the cables they had only reached so far. Instead there was a spotlight guy up on the second floor and they had a handheld radio between him and Bea to relay any important information.

Bea sat at the computer after hooking up the mic stands to the sound mixer. It felt pretty hodge-podge, just running the line directly into the board like that. But it was a hodge-podge operation. The curtain was anchored to the sides of the stage with safety pins.

As she waited for the computer to boot up, Bea rested her hands on the cool, smooth surface of the desk and sighed. She could already hear the brakes of a busload of seniors outside the art center. The show wasn’t far off.

Then she jolted up as someone knocked on the frame of the director’s booth beside her. It was the Janitor.

“You free? We got ourselves an issue,” he said.

“Oh… uh, yeah. Okay.” Bea gave him a puzzled look, but he gave nothing back. Instead he walked past her, ambling down the stairs in a casual saunter. Bea pushed back her chair and followed.

~~~

“We got ourselves an issue,” was, to Bea’s mind at least, technical talk for “something is on fire but I can’t say that outright because someone might panic.”

So as she followed the Janitor she expected anything from a busted water pipe to half a truck stuck through the wall. He led her to a part of the floor that had been walled off and divided into a cubicle farm. This was the administrative wing of the factory, where people who actually ran the place worked. Bea had been there once during her job interview. Only occasionally visiting in her futile quest to fix her name tag. 

The offices used the same brushed metal partitions that defined the studio spaces. The main superficial difference here was the lack of art. The Janitor led Bea between a row of cubicles to the end of the hall. They stopped at the door to a meeting room. She remembered it from her interview; whiteboard on the wall, folding metal chairs lining a plastic table not unlike something from a cafeteria.

“Here we go,” said the Janitor. “Brace your ears.” He gripped the door and opened it before Bea could inquire into this.

A braying elderly man’s voice poured out of the open door. “I’m telling you this is a terrorist plot! This is a blow to local morale! There needs to be a search party!”

“I’m not sure I’d go that far…” another voice, feminine. With the kind of enunciation and gentle condescension that activated the deep down part of Bea’s brain that screamed “schoolteacher.”

“Pah! There ain’t no other explanation for it! They know I’m a pillar! A pillar of the community and… who the devil are you?”

The man’s back was bowed and he wore a powder blue sweater. He wielded a walking cane in Bea’s general direction and he peered owlishly at them through big round spectacles. He was wrinkled, sallow and liver-spotted with white hair that clustered around his shining scalp in wiry tufts.

The woman was middle-aged and in appearance was a curious mix of a frumpy professor and counter-culture punk with her short-spiked hair and the glimpse of tattoos peaking from under the sleeves of her peach cardigan. She looked at the Janitor with some degree of relief.

“Anything yet?” she said.

“Nope,” the Janitor said with a pop in the ‘p.’ “Thought it would be a good idea to get another pair of eyes for it. Faster legs too. My old stilts ain’t moving like they used to, haw haw!”

The woman didn’t seem to find the humor in that. She turned to Bea, regarding her with an appraising look. “Do I know you?”

“Uh. Probably not?” Bea ventured. “I’m a jan— um, I’m a—”

“You hired her last month,” said the Janitor. “She’s on the maintenance team.”

The woman’s face blanched. “Of course. I’m sorry. I’m still getting used to running a project so big that I don’t know everyone’s faces. I’m Director Quelcy, I head the board of trustees for the Glass Factory.”

Bea nodded and managed a little smile. “Beatrice Santello. Um. Maintenance.” She clasped her hands in front of her, waiting for whatever job she had apparently just been volunteered into.

Like a geriatric explosion, the man next to Director Quelcy threw his arms up into the air. “Where the hell are my puppets!”

Bea looked between the Janitor and the Director.

“Yes, yes, Mister Penderson,” Director Quelcy said in a soothing tone. “I assure you we will do everything we can to find them. They can’t have gone far.”

“Puppets?” said Bea.

Quelcy turned to her and the Janitor, a brittle smile on her face. Then she turned back to Mister Penderson. “We will get in touch with you the moment — the very _moment_ — we find them. You have my word, okay?” She put her hands on his shoulders and very gently but very firmly guided him towards the door. “Please… just let us work.”

Bea thought the Director was being quite diplomatic throughout this whole thing but there was definitely an edge of exasperation in her voice.

“If you don’t find it in half an hour, I’m calling the Department of Homeland Security! This is terrorism I’m sure of it!” Mister Penderson said just as the Director closed the door on him.

Director Quelcy rested her head against the door frame. “Someone kill me and send me to hell.”

“Think finding them puppets might be better,” said the Janitor.

She whirled around to face Bea and the Janitor. “It’s a box. Wooden. About this big.” She held her hands out in front of her. “And it’s painted orange and blue, stuffed full of hand puppets. Please find it before I lose my damn mind.”

“Puppets?” Bea repeated.

“Penderson’s Puppet Pals is the biggest act of comedy night,” Director Quelcy said with an intensity that should never be associated with the sentence she just spoke. “The old folks love it and now his stupid awful box of stupid awful puppets has gone missing. With any luck the cart they were on just… I don’t know. Rolled into an empty studio or something but however it happened we need to get it back because I am not going to have five different nursing homes lobbying the tourism board to strike the Factory from tourist pamphlets because an old man didn’t have a scrap of felt to make a crass joke with. _Go out there and find those puppets_.”

Bea’s legs did not immediately work until the Director started making shoo-ing motions with her hands. The Janitor nudged her shoulder and the two walked past Director Quelcy and out the door. Mercifully, Penderson had tottered away rather than lurk to harangue them.

She looked up at the Janitor. “We’re seriously doing this? Puppets? That guy does puppet shows?”

The Janitor, thoroughly unruffled, shrugged. “Comedy night,” he said by way of explanation. “Been sent on stranger goose chases. You check the ground floor and the receiving area, I’ll look around the upper floors.”

“But are we seriously… I mean… puppets?”

“I’ll go grab one of the interns here to work the computers while you look around.”

The Janitor walked between the cubicles and Bea followed wordlessly.

~~~

Maybe it wasn’t fair, treating this as a task that was beneath her. No, it definitely wasn’t fair. This was property, and it was property that had been lost. It was stupid to feel demeaned by this because finding lost shit was definitely a job that would be foisted onto someone like Bea. It just rankled her, a reminder that she was… someone like Bea.

Puppets!

Bea checked the ground floor dutifully, even the places where puppets had no business being (where did puppets have any business being? Other than on a children’s show or stashed in some storage room somewhere, forgotten by a world that had moved on from felt-based forms of entertainment). Would it have helped if she got a description of what they looked like? No, that was silly. Did she expect to run across a completely different set of puppets in this building? The universe surely would not be so cruel.

Supply closets and bathrooms and the receiving room. Nothing. Bea felt a profound sense of aimlessness. This wasn’t the kind of thing that happened to people who had their life in order. And if she went to the Janitor empty-handed he’d just have her keep looking. There wasn’t anywhere _to_ look. Someone stole puppets. It was the obvious conclusion. Nobody wanted to say it out loud, especially with Penderson right there because no one deserved his ire. Bea hoped to the various saints that he did follow through with his threat, and that it got him interrogated by the FBI in some windowless room far from here.

But who goes around stealing puppets? And how long was she going to have to fake caring about this awful non-problem? Wasn’t he… insured? Is there puppet insurance? Probably. God, she needed a cigarette. As she walked she spotted Angus, sitting at the cafe by himself scrolling through his phone. The audience had grown and the show would be on in minutes. And she was looking for puppets. At least she was still on the clock. She needed a break. Desperately.

Smoking at work was a thing she tried to avoid. It cut into her lunch break and Bea felt it was not professional to smell like cigarettes while working. Then again, she had on more than one occasion walked to Jackie’s apartment with wet trash stink on her clothes and sucking on nicotine in the middle of her shift was a way to deal with that.

There was a place outside the Glass Factory where Bea felt comfortable smoking. On its wharf-side, the Glass Factor along with a cluster of other buildings — mainly restaurants, little tourist shops and ticket booths for various boats — formed a U-shape that opened out onto the docks. The promenade in the middle was a popular intersection for tourists criss-crossing from one building to the other. One of the bends in the U was crowded in and less heavily trafficked, more utilitarian. The garbage trucks made their pick-ups there. Bea would take her breaks there, prying eyes and flame-snuffing winds blocked by fences and garbage bins.

A quick breather, that was all Bea needed. Then back to work. Running around looking for someone’s lost crap. Joyous.

The sky was gray above her, framed in brick by her surroundings. Overcast clouds lay overhead like a mottled blanket, moving in a single mass in a wet wind that promised rain. Bea liked this kind of weather. The heavy cloud cover was so close she could imagine reaching up from the top of the tallest building in Old Harbor and grazing the underside with her fingertips. It was a cozy feeling. The wind was cool but with a trace of warm moisture that felt refreshing when she breathed in deep. With the wind and the migration of clouds she felt like the world was passing over her, through her. Like messengers bringing her impressions of other places.

Bea closed her eyes, idly rolling the cigarette between her lips. She could feel her heartbeat slow. She could stay here, leaning against the wall amongst loading docks and garbage, and be quite comfortable for some time. Forget where she was and focus on the cool air and — 

Her phone chimed. She opened her eyes.

**where you at**

It was Jackie.

_Work._

**no shit where at work im here right now**

_Why?_

**uh i said so earlier remember  
** **at the cafe right now  
** **omg whos this loser with the tiny fedora**

_Okay I’m outside be there in a moment._

She pocketed her phone. A sigh, a groan, the crack of stretching limbs. Symphony of Getting Back to the Bullshit in Bea Minor. Ha ha ha. She threw her cigarette to the ground and smashed it under her heel.

Bea rounded a rusting metal dumpster, where she collided with something that forced the air from her lungs. It was soft, small, and it said “oof.”

Bea looked down. And Mae looked up.

Mae’s eye’s widened in shock and recognition.

“Oh shit,” she said.

“Oh shit,” said someone else. Bea looked past Mae and there was some guy. A guy she didn’t get much of an impression of beyond his shock of ginger hair, because her main focus was on what he was carrying. It was a colorful orange and blue wooden box, its lid flapping open from brass hinges and a small crowd of puppets staring out from within.

She looked back at Mae, eyes narrowing. “ _You._ ”

Mae skipped back, the soles of her sneakers scraping over the cracked concrete. “Gregg, run!” she said, pivoting and sprinting back out towards the docks.

Her companion shuffled, indecisive, then held the box over his head and dashed after her. “Mae! Wait!”

Bea didn’t stop to think. She ran after them. 

~~~

There were times in life when reality could be a real bummer. Bea encountered one of those moments about thirty seconds into the chase, when her legs reminded her that they ached constantly from lifting heavy shit and walking around all day. Then her lungs joined in to remind her that she was a smoker who didn’t do much cardio.

A little part of Bea’s head, the part that stood to the side while the rest of her was engaged with grappling with the present and all its horribleness, looked at herself in the moment. Panting, chasing after two people with quite short legs and still having a hard time keeping up. That part of her thought: _you didn’t think this through all that well, did you? What exactly was your plan, anyway? Are you making a citizen’s arrest? How far are you willing to take this silliness, with your ridiculous stick legs?_

Back in high school, one of Bea’s teachers liked to compliment her on how she was always asking questions and always thinking. Bea wished she could see that teacher now, to call her an unpleasant name and kick her in the shin.

Bea’s heavy boots thumped on brick as the alley gave way to the promenade that spilled out into the dock. Mae wasn’t making much progress with the evening crowd and her accomplice was easy to pick out, a box of puppets held aloft in his hands and bobbing in the throng. Bea watched as he lost his balance, tipping the box over enough for some colorful creature to tumble out. As Bea caught up to it she scooped it up, already trod on with a faint gray shoe print across its abdomen. Bea spared it a quick glance. It looked like a person in a frilly white wedding dress? And there was a little prop ball-and-chain sewn into its little felt hand. If she had a moment to spare she’d roll her eyes in that really good way that she had perfected over the years that communicated world-weary contempt. It was a sad day when she couldn’t dedicate herself to a really good eye-roll. What was society coming to?

She weaved around people, catching glimpses of Mae. It would have been nearly impossible to track someone so short, so it was a lucky thing she was wearing a vivide orange shirt that stuck out garishly in the crowd. They were approaching the docks and the river’s edge.

Bea broke through the crowd just in time to see Mae’s accomplice overturn the box and dump every puppet out into the river.

Her mouth hung open as she skidded to a stop.

“Dude, what the _hell_?” Mae shouted.

“We’ve gotta get rid of the evidence!”

“You’re… everybody’s looking, Gregg!”

“No time, come on!” Gregg rushed towards Mae, one hand still holding the now empty box, his other hand grabbed her by the collar and he pushed past Bea, who had momentarily put her chase on hold process what had happened. There, lapping against the posts, settling in amongst the detritus — the plastic bags, the paper cups, a dead fish with its pale belly poking out of the brackish water — were the rest of the puppets. 

Several thoughts occurred to Bea in that moment:

_A) Yes, this is my life._

_B) No, I am not fishing the puppets out of there._

_C) Yes, I totally am going to get those assholes for this._

There was still that little voice in her head that was suggesting maybe, as a custodian/maintenance worker, she was operating outside her job description and should, perhaps, slow her roll. This was becoming less about puppets and more about something else that maybe Bea should stop and examine. Except they were getting away _right now_ and this wasn’t the time to slow anything. Bea turned on her heels and followed after the pair as they made for the Glass Factory.

Bea huffed and picked up speed. Beyond Mae, her eyes were drawn to a flash of light as the entrance door to the art center swung open, catching the sun. And then Jackie came out.

Slowing and taking in a breath, Bea shouted over the distance. “Jackie! Get them!” 

It was, perhaps, unfair of Bea to bring Jackie into this. Jackie was a person who Did Not Fuck Around. And that included the application of violence. “Carry a knife, learn to throw a punch, be ready for when shit goes down” was not just a social media profile for her (although it absolutely was that too). Bea watched as Jackie looked at her, then looked at Mae, then looked at her again. Bea nodded and pointed. Something in Jackie’s look caused Mae to slow down, pulling from Gregg’s grip. Gregg continued on, past Jackie and into the building.

Jackie lifted her arm, bracing for a classic clothesline. Bea had seen it before. It was a good clothesline, one that had been deployed on two separate occasions that she had witnessed. Once against a drunk when he got handsy and violent during a night out, and another time when Bea had visited Bright Harbor a couple Springs ago and Jackie had used it during the St. Patrick’s Day midnight rugby match held every year at one of the city’s universities. She’d gotten a red flag for that one but her form was perfect.

And it likely would have worked great here and now, if she had taken into account Mae’s height. Jackie’s arm sailed over Mae, who ducked underneath then looked back with wide eyes. “Whoa!” she said.

Jackie ducked down, pivoted and made a frantic grab for her torso. At the same time Mae attempted to twist out of Jackie’s reach. Instead, she tripped over her own feet, tripped, and smashed her head right into Jackie’s face.

Jackie fell unceremoniously back onto her ass and winced. Mae looked from her to Bea and, to Bea’s surprise, there was a degree of actual anger in her expression.

“You narc’d on me you _cop snitch_!” She said before running into the art center

“Holy shit, Jackie, are you alright?” Bea said once she jogged over to where Jackie was still sitting. She held out her hand and Jackie took it, hauling herself up.

“Ow. I’m fine, but I’m gonna need new glasses.” Jackie held hers up. The frame was bent at an angle. “Bea, what the hell was that all about? Did she mug you or something?”

“Um. I’ll explain later, I gotta… I’ll explain later!” Bea patted Jackie on the shoulder before moving past her. The entrance to the Glass Factory was a narrow hall that opened into the main area and usually congested. There was, however, an employee entrance. Locked, opening straight into the studio floor. Bea pulled out her keys and unlocked the door in a quick motion.

And then she was inside. And there was the stage. And the show was going on.

“— now that’s a whoppah! Folks, this is a great audience, I gotta say!”

“They haven’t thrown a single tomato yet.”

“That gag is older than we are, Garbo.”

“That’s how you get heritage tomatoes, Malloy.”

Scattered laughter.

Fishing wet felt from stinking filth water was probably preferable to this, thought Bea.

Bea caught sight of Mae — pink and black hair amongst gray heads — at the same time Mae saw her. Bea couldn’t spot Mae’s accomplice, so she kept her focus on Mae even as Mae attempted to put the audience between them.

Bea cut through along the back, less crowd, more speed. Mae shot a dismayed look at her, then changed direction.

Mouth agape, Bea watched in horror as Mae mounted the stage and a murmur ran through the audience. Bea weaved between tables. “Hey! Get off there!” This mostly resulted in a resounding silence, the shifting of attention from Mae to Bea and the latter’s desire to shrivel up into a ball and vanish.

Mae stuck her tongue out and extended a middle finger that figuratively poked a red button in Bea’s brain. She surged forward, clambering onto the stage using an adjacent table as a step-up and ignoring the indignant protest of an audience member whose coffee cake she had demolished under her knee.

For her part, Mae backed off as Bea rose up. Just as Bea grabbed her by her shirt sleeve, Mae had entangled herself in the legs of the two comedians still on the stage, tripping into them and causing Bea to tumble after.

Things got complicated after that. In the ensuing mess of flailing limbs, somebody pulled over the mic stand, pulling the microphone cord taught, which in turn pulled at Bea’s mixer, which was basically a battering ram with some wires inside of it. It zipped over the surface of the desk, smashing into the rickety support holding up half of the stage’s proscenium. The collision jarred the structure hard enough to dislodge the “LAFFOSSEUM” sign.

The plywood sign scythed down onto the stage, crashing behind the four still struggling to separate themselves. The sign teetered upright for a brief moment before falling over on top of them. Bea hardly had time to register what was going on before she felt herself pressed down onto the stage by a weight that, while not crushing, was definitely not insignificant.

A cloud of dust and plywood splinters washed over the crowd like they were in the splash zone of an orca performance.

“That…” said a male voice between groaning and coughing, “… was a whoppah.”

“It really brought the house down, Malloy,” said his partner. They both laughed in wheezy gasps. Bea fantasized of comedian death.

Their eyes stinging from the debris, the four managed to push the splintered sign off of themselves. Through tear streaked vision, Bea looked around. Dust danced in the harsh beam of the spotlight that shined down on them like their own personal and very judgmental sun. There were shouts of alarm and outrage from the audience and the sounds of chairs scraping over the floor. With a hopeful kind of foolishness Bea tried to take heart in that nobody sounded like they were screaming in agony or anything. It was hard to tell though. She had never destroyed a large structure in front of a crowd before. A lead weight of dread settled into her stomach and she felt dizzy from the sheer amount of _actual fear_ she felt for her immediate future, the status of anyone she may have injured/killed, the impending meteor strike of legal actions, the all-encompassing typhoon of destruction that was about to hurl itself onto the creaking, fragile shack of her awful life. How could a life be turned upside down so fast and so brutally? 

Vaguely, she could see Jackie huffing towards the stage. She could see Angus’ little hat bobbing closer to them as everyone else pressed to the exits.

Bea caught movement from the corner of her eye. Mae was looking around her, mouth open, eyes wide and staring, pupils dilated as if she were trying to absorb as much of the destruction around her as she could. Bea could see a mad light dancing in Mae’s eyes. A trickster god twinkle like a jester’s brass bell catching the light of a cackling magician’s pyrotechnic cantrip. Both present and absent, simultaneously the child’s awestruck gaze and the shell-shocked veteran’s middle-distance stare. Particles were colliding. Despite the odds, Mae had careened back into Bea’s path. Random happenstance _became_ a pattern. Mae was smiling. 

“Holy shit,” she said. “That was awesome!”

_Holy shit_ , Bea thought, _I’m dead_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so
> 
> this took a lot longer than i anticipated getting out
> 
> a lottttttt longer
> 
> life got stressful for a number of reasons! these things happen.
> 
> anyway, if you are interested in following my progress in actually writing this story, you can follow the tumblr i recently started.
> 
> [here](https://eldritchgarboandcosmicmalloy.tumblr.com)
> 
> anway, i hope you enjoyed the chapter, work on the next is already underway.


	5. Falling from the Apogee

Bea had never fired anyone from a job. Her father had never trusted her _that_ much. Enough to sap her youth on the store that he owned, but never to truly run it. 

She had also never been in a position to be fired from a job. So all this was going to be a novel experience for her.

_It sure was nice while it lasted_ , she thought. Once again in the meeting room in the office wing, she sat at the table with one leg bouncing full of nervous tension.

She could always get a new job. Providing any new employer wouldn’t follow up with her recent work history. “Endangered clients by rendering a structure into a pile of splinters” was not a ringing endorsement. So. New job. Since she was daydreaming, she could also imagine herself winning a lottery she never bought tickets for, or stumbling upon ancient pirate treasure. It was fun to make-believe.

The alternative was going back home.

Bea’s shoulders hunched up and she felt actual cold entwining her ribs. She had promised herself she’d never get stuck back in the mountains ever again and this was the best she could manage? A couple months living on a friend’s couch, sweeping floors? She closed her eyes. 

“Dude, you okay?”

Maybe she couldn’t stay here, but that didn’t mean she had to go back. A bus out west. Into the desert or the plains. A shitty town but not _her_ shitty town. Someplace cheap and small. She could scratch a life out of the earth there, a foxhole to survive in until she got old and died an anonymous death.

She opened her eyes, which had been directed down into her lap. Her fingers curled and uncurled. She had a hazy memory of many years ago of cartoons where the cartoon animal would do the “dive into a glass of water” gag. Leap from a stomach-flipping height into a small cup, all laws of physics put aside, anatomy ignored, all so someone could compress themselves down into something impossibly small. That’s what she wanted to do right now. Be small. Be unnoticeable. Preferably in a corner where she could weep and be alone.

“Hey, you’re getting, like, all pale and sweaty. Dude?”

Looking up, Bea directed a red-rimmed stare and scowl at Mae, sitting across the table from her. Mae was sprawled over two chairs, with her head propped up by one arm on the table. She watched Bea intently.

Bea felt her mouth unlock itself from its frown. Just enough to speak. “Do not. Talk to me.”

Mae rolled her eyes. “How are we supposed to get our stories straight if I don’t talk to you?”

“We’re… we don’t need to get our stories straight!” Bea said. Indignation, heretofore repressed, overcame her self-pity. “There’s like a hundred witnesses that saw what happened!”

“Dude, just play it cool and none of that will matter!”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I though we were here on account of the massive property damage that happened in full view of a live audience. Is that not why we’re here? I suppose we could be waiting for a different reason _entirely_.”

Mae’s face was contorted with a perplexed expression. “Okay, first off, we didn’t — it wasn’t ‘massive property damage,’ okay? A sign fell and that was it. You’re like, super blowing this out of proportion. Second of all, we are totally capable of getting out of this. Look at us! They left us alone in a room. I don’t see any cameras. That shows we are dealing with amateurs. Even a middle school principal would know not to leave two students in a room alone when they’re in trouble. It’s a perfect time to make a cover story.”

“We’re not lying our way out of this.”

“I mean, not with that attitude.”

Bea shot Mae a look. “You really think you can get away with all this crap you pulled?”

“Whatever! What did I even do? You practically tackled me on stage! You had someone else do it out on the docks! The hell was that?”

“You stole!”

“Stole what?” Mae endeavored to look smug. It made Bea wish she could stare literal daggers into people.

“The puppets! You and your… friend.”

“I don’t have any puppets. I mean, between the two of us, the only one here with a puppet is you.” Mae pointed. Bea had stuffed the weird wedding dress puppet into her pocket. “And as for a friend, I don’t know who you are talking about.”

“He had the box!”

Mae shrugged. “Well, whoever he is, he isn’t here. It’s just you and me and that’s it.”

Bea frowned. That was a fair point. The guy — “Gregg,” Mae had called him — had vanished the moment he slipped into the Glass Factory. And with him a key piece of evidence.

“Look, you can tell the truth if you want,” said Mae. “But there’s like, literally no reason to and plenty of reason to lie. I guess you’re, like, angry with me? And you think you’re going to nail me with all this evidence you don’t have? But is being angry worth getting yourself in trouble?”

The door swung open and Director Quelcy came in. She was flanked by two men, The Janitor at one side and another old man, heavy-set and gray-bearded. Bea could see a slight smile behind the fluff of his beard and a twinkle in his eye when he looked past her.

“Mae Borowski, my best worst student!”

“Ha ha, hey Professor Chazokov.” Mae’s expression faltered. She looked abashed. Bea stared without really meaning to. It was weirdly out of place. “Uh, what are you doing here?”

“I have a special phone that only rings when you get in trouble, little Borowski! Beh heh heh! That was a joke. I got a call on my regular phone.”

“If we can move on,” Director Quelcy said as she shut the door. Chazokov nodded and the three of them settled into their own seats. The Janitor gave Bea a slight head tilt in acknowledgment. Bea bit the inside of her cheek.

“Folks’ve been cleared out,” the Janitor said. He directed it to no one in particular, but Bea felt this must have been for her benefit. “No one’s hurt, but everyone’s gonna have a story to tell.”

“Not quite the story I was hoping for,” said the Director. She drew the attention of Bea and Mae. “The good news is no one is pressing charges. Yet. The night is young. The bad news is the tourism board is going to have questions all the same and we just handed some ammo to the pricks in the city council who’d love for an excuse to cut public funds to the center. Other good news: the Laffoseum is canceled for the foreseeable future.”

“Never did care for the name,” said the Janitor.

“ _Regardless_ of how things shake out — because this situation is very much still up in the air,” said the Director, looking at both Bea and Mae in turn; “I expect a hell of a good explanation for what just happened out there.”

Bea saw Mae open her mouth, and spoke up before Mae got the chance. “I can explain, yes, Director.”

“Okay.” Director Quelcy squinted at Bea’s name tag. “Go on, Bean.”

“Um. It’s Bea. Beatrice Santello. We met earlier.”

“I know that. Your thing says ‘Bean’ on it.”

“Yeah, um. Yes. That’s —”

“Is it a nickname?”

“No. It’s a typo.”

“Well get it changed, we can’t have employees walking around with the wrong name, guests don’t like that.”

“Right. Yes. Um. Now?” Bea’s train of thought took its time getting back on track. Especially since the Director was talking as if she still had a job here.

“No, not now! I want to know what went on out there!”

“Ain’t much to it,” said the Janitor. Bea frowned at his interjection, but stayed silent. “Way I figure it, sign weren’t properly secured. That one’s on me.”

Director Quelcy rubbed her eyes with both hands, fingers reaching behind her lenses. “I’m going to get through this and the rest of the night, then I’m going to go home and text my friends and ask them why can’t people just follow simple instructions like I want one person I specifically asked to tell me what happened.”

“Okay,” Mae interjected, “so, what I did was —”

“Not you,” Quelcy said with a sigh. “You are… on profoundly thin ice. Margaret, you’ve been warned before about this kind of behavior and I think I’ve shown a lot of leniency up to this point. I’m going to have a talk with the Dean’s office.”

Mae froze and went pale, her hands on the table, fingers splayed wide. “Wait, you can’t do that!”

Beside her, Professor Chazokov cleared his throat. “Please, Director, Miss Borowski is talented young woman. This is a decision maybe you could sleep on?”

“Maybe,” said the Director, “but this, _combined_ with encouraging wild rats to nest around the building? Plus that time she set off the fire alarm?”

“That… that was an accident.” Mae said, sullen dejection in her voice. Bea watched with the fascination of an onlooker at a car crash. Mae had hunched in on herself and was staring down at her hands, still spread against the tabletop.

“Yes, I know,” said Director Quelcy. “But it’s becoming too much. And I still don’t know who took a baseball bat to that city councilmember’s car but you are on the short list of suspects for that one too.”

“Surely she deserve one more chance!” said Chazokov. “This is much too short notice, yes?”

“Just… we are not having that conversation right now.” Quelcy turned to Bea. “Now, will everyone be quiet and Beatrice, please explain to me why you two decided to charge the stage, and then destroy it?”

Bea opened her mouth. A little squeak came out. She had been jolted from unexpected reverie, having watched Mae withdraw into herself. She had become such a shadow under the Director’s scrutiny that it was hard to believe she was the same person Bea had chased across the docks and up onto the stage. The same person with that maniac smile, watching the chaos under the spotlight.

Mae was staring, wide-eyed and paralyzed like a deer in the headlights. Staring with a vacant intensity that, if it could take physical form, would have drilled a hole through the table. She was rocking back and forth in a daze and Bea could see her chest rise and fall rapidly. The color had drained from her face.

“Uh…” said Bea. “Uh,” she said again. It felt like a good thing to say while her brain reviewed what it was she planned on saying. When she came in, she was convinced her job was doomed and she was sitting across from the one who had destroyed it. But now, at the moment where she should be relishing some vindictive triumph, justice most savagely served, all she could think about was how small Mae looked at this moment and how total that contrast was from the outsized energy she had earlier. It felt wrong to deliver the finishing blow in that moment.

Bea wasn’t going to do it.

“I asked her to,” Bea said. She looked up at Director Quelcy, who arched one eyebrow. From one practitioner of the eyebrow arch to another, Bea silently approved of the technique on display. “Um, I mean, I didn’t ask her to, uh, do that _exact_ thing, but… uh, I was watching from the crowd and… uh, I realized I forgot to secure the sound board.” This was not a thing, but Bea was counting on the Director not knowing that. “M-Mae was watching with me and I was going to… I told her I needed to stop the show. Because there was a risk. Of injury. Mae wanted to help me interrupt the show but… I guess she was too eager… or… yeah.”

Bea looked up at Director Quelcy. _I’m going to be fired either way_ , she decided with grim resolve before she spoke again. “It was my fault she was up there. She may have tripped over her own feet, but I was the one who asked for her help. It was my responsibility, not hers. Her only mistake was listening to me.”

The Director pursed her lips. Bea, in a nervous tic, began chewing on her own tongue as she returned Director Quelcy’s stare. There was no way she was going to buy this awful lie. This was the worst mistake Bea had made since the last worst mistake.

“I can vouch for her, Director,” the Janitor said. “She’s been with us a short time but she’s a solid sort. Been tending the Black Goat without missing a step.”

The buzz of the overhead lights were the only audible sound in that room. On her periphery Bea could see Mae, a dark shape with her jaw hanging slack as she stared at Bea. Bea ignored this.

“Okay,” said the Director. “Okay, okay.” She sighed. Bea did her best not to stare like a loon. There was no possible way this was going to work, was it?

“Don’t get many like that, if you catch my meaning,” the Janitor said.

“And if I may,” said Chazokov, “you know my opinion of Mae. She is a… good person. Really. And no one was hurt.”

“If that were not the case,” said Quelcy, “If anyone had so much as a splinter, you’d both be out of here. Some of the audience thought this was all part of the act!”

“R-really?” said Bea.

The Director snorted. “Garbo and Malloy are so bad that a few of the old folks were convinced that they were some kind of high-concept performance art act. They’re so bad that they introduced the Greatest Generation to irony poisoned post-modern 21st century absurdist humor!” Quelcy let out a quick fit of laughter before cupping her hand over her mouth. Then she cast her face into a grim expression, like a curtain falling over the stage.

“If I hear one peep from one lawyer, if one police officer so much as parallel parks in front of the Glass Factory, if one insurance company rings me up on my phone, I will have you two back in here to discuss your very brief future inside this building. I don’t believe a single excuse I’ve heard here but I don’t like kicking out students and I don’t like firing employees. I am a believer in second chances. If we can chalk this up to a one-time thing and _never again_ … then I’m willing to overlook it.”

Bea felt as if fingers that had been curled around her lungs had loosened their grip. They were actually going to do it. All they had to do was nod, thank the Director for her restraint and never ever —

“So we can go?” Mae said. She was, in an instant, fully recovered and Bea was once again regretting things about her life. “Like, we can leave now?”

Director Quelcy gave her a long look. “Not yet. You need busy work, Mae. I clearly can’t have you running around willy-nilly in this building.”

“I have a portfolio I need to —”

“If you needed to do anything you’d be doing that and not climbing onto stages,” Quelcy said firmly. “You’ve just volunteered yourself to help out with the Halloween festivities all the way up to the end of the month.”

Mae made little sounds of protest as she searched for words. “But I have a job! Like, a late-night one!”

“Figure out a way to make it work, Mae. I’m serious when I say you’re on thin ice. I believe in second chances, but I’ve lost count of how many chances you’re on at this point.”

Mae slumped back in her chair. “I… guess…”

“Good. And Beatrice?” said the Director.

“Um. Yes? Director?”

“You’re on notice too. I don’t want anything — _anything_ — like tonight’s incident again, understood?”

“Understood.”

“If you so much as knock over a jack-o-lantern, I don’t think we’ll be needing your services any further.”

“Understood.”

“Until there are any further developments, I’d rather put this whole thing behind me,” said Director Quelcy. “And I’m sure you all feel the same. I’m going to be in my office. I have so many phone calls I have to make now. Oh. Did you ever find those puppets?” she said, turning to Bea.

Silently, Bea held up the one puppet that she had recovered. The Director made a face.

“Ugh. The ball-and-chain bride. Penderson is a deeply unhappy man, and I’m glad he’s very old because it means he might die soon. Leave it with me, I have to decide if I’m going to give it to him or throw it into a fire and just say we couldn’t find any of them.”

Bea handed it over. Quelcy gave them all a tight little smile, then left.

Professor Chazokov clapped his hands together to end the intervening silence. “Well! That did not go so bad, eh little Borowski?”

“It went bad! I can’t… I mean… agh! Volunteering? I don’t have time! Agh!”

“Indeed, ‘agh,’” said Chazokov. “But you can still make such noises and that is something worth being grateful for. Now. I must return. I have evening classes. When your little friend said you were in trouble, I did not know what to expect, but that is why you make me laugh! Beh heh heh.”

“Yeah. Uh. Thanks. For sticking your neck out? Kind of?”

“Of course, Mae! Try not to give Director hard time, okay? This can’t last forever you know. Come by sometime. Saturn will look particularly bright in a few nights. We can get a good look at its rings, yes?”

“Oh wow. Okay.” She waved as the Professor left.

The Janitor got up from his chair. “Welp. That’s that. You still up for helping out during the holiday season?” He looked down at Bea, who jolted once she realized he was addressing her.

“Um. Yeah. I… I’m still good for that.”

“Alright then. Gotta get that mess cleaned up now. If’n I do it quick I’ll be able to catch the back end of the Smelter’s game tonight.”

“Oh. Do you. Uh, need help —”

The Janitor waved Bea off. “You get on home. You’ve had quite the day. We’ll talk about your new schedule tomorrow.”

“Alright. Thanks. For. Speaking up.” Bea said, haltingly. Gratitude did not come out of her mouth easily. It usually worked best when she had time to take a running start at it.

The Janitor shrugged. “I’m not exactly eager to look through more applications. You do good work.”

“Okay,” Bea said, a touch skeptical.

With the two older men gond Bea sat, still not entirely ready to stand up. Mae seemed similarly afflicted.

“Wow,” Mae said. “I can’t believe we got away with that.”

“You didn’t get away with anything!”

“Oh. Yeah. Volunteer work. I forgot.”

“How could you forget? It happened just now.”

“I don’t know! There’s a lot going on! Like, all the time!”

“God,” said Bea. She stood up.

“Where you going?”

“I’m leaving. I’m going to pretend this was all a nightmare, starting with the moment that I had to deal with _you_.”

“Wow, okay.” Mae stood up. As Bea left the conference room she could hear Mae jogging slightly behind her.

“What are you doing?” Bea said.

“Just… following? You?”

“That’s definitely a course of action that makes sense for you to do after what I just said, sure.”

“But jeez, it’s cool that I get to keep my studio. I mean, you have to wait a long time for one to open up. Technically I’m not even, like, an art student. This is an elective. Um. Technically. I got real lucky getting that spot.” Mae’s face lit up. “Also! Um. Thanks for covering for me. I know you didn’t have to do that. For real.”

“Don’t mention it,” Bea said. “Really, really don’t mention it.” She had never really been in a position where she could straight up ruin another person’s life. And when she was there, and she had seen Mae, small and pale and withdrawn, she couldn’t do it. So she had an ounce of pity in her. It was hardly an earthshaking revelation.

“Like, I thought I was thoroughly screwed when Quelcy started rattling off shit that I did,” said Mae.

_Oh right, there was that,_ Bea thought.

“Then it turned out she didn’t even know of like, most of the shit I did!” said Mae. “Like, she didn’t say anything about me trespassing into the restricted areas, which, heh, you knew about but I guess you never said anything? Sorry about calling you a snitch, now that I think of it. Oh, she never even mentioned the bathroom that I trashed!”

Eyes widening, Bea stopped and rounded on Mae. “That was _you_?”

“Um. Yeah?”

Bea held up an accusatory finger. “You scratched up the mirrors and clogged the toilets!”

“Yeah!”

“I spent _five hours_ cleaning that place up!”

Mae slumped. “Oh. Yeah. I forgot you’re, like, a janitor.”

Bea was positively vibrating. She looked Mae up and down for something, anything. She wasn’t even sure what. And when she came back empty, all Bea could do was sigh and turn around. _I should have sunk her and never looked back. Pity is garbage,_ she concluded.

~~~

Bea lost Mae at the exit, thankfully. She had stopped at the door and if she gave Bea a farewell, Bea did not hear it or return it. Mae receded, like a ghost at the boundaries of its haunt.

“You need me to kick her ass?” Jackie said. She had been waiting outside.

“No,” Bea said after some consideration.

“So what the hell was all that earlier about?”

“God, don’t make me relive this day,” said Bea. “Today was a reminder why I don’t engage with people as a general rule. I need to smoke non-stop for exactly five weeks.”

As she started on this quest she set for herself, Jackie managed to extract all the day’s events from Bea.

“It could be worse,” said Jackie.

“Mm,” said Bea.

“But, I don’t know, maybe dial it back? I thought you were in actual danger, not chasing a puppet thief.”

Bea bit back a retort, instead letting out a long, smoke-laced sigh. “I know. I was. Shit. I just lost it so hard. Over something so stupid.”

“Anything you feel like talking about?” said Jackie.

Bea looked at her. “I literally just talked about it. I lost my shit over something stupid. There. Talked about.”

“Come on,” Jackie looked as if she was trying to pluck the right words out of thin air. “It’s never just the one thing, is what I’m saying. For instance —”

“For instance I have a mountain of other issues that I haven’t dealt with and it made me act like a damn loon? Gee Jackie, that sure hadn’t occurred to me. That sure hasn’t been the whole situation since like, high school.”

“Yes, yes. You could, I don’t know, deal with them? In some capacity? Running away isn’t the way,” Jackie said.

Bea cast her hands out into the night sky. “It is, actually. It totally is. Life isn’t a movie that wraps up all its plot points in two hours. Life is one thing colliding into another with no resolution in sight. I can be a train wreck if I want to be, things can be awful and I’ll learn to live with that awfulness.”

“For someone so resigned to misery you sure do complain about it,” said Jackie.

“Complaining is my coping mechanism.”

“Cigarettes too.”

“Yeah. Those too. I’m not so much a person as I am a system of loosely held-together crisis responses.”

“That’s really depressing.”

“Turns out you get used to it. Anyway, I’ll be fine. I’m getting extra pay by working the holidays. Then after that maybe I can dare to hope for a little respite in my life? Who knows! I just want things to be chill for like, a little while. Just long enough to catch my breath, you know?”

Jackie shrugged. “I don’t have nearly the problems you have and I still feel like I can’t catch my breath.”

It had occurred to Bea that she had not asked Jackie how she was doing in all this. It occurred to Bea that she was a profoundly bad friend. “Things, uh, good with you?”

“It’s the end of the world and nobody’s good, Bea. Let’s just enjoy the ride. Rent’s going up at the end of the month.”

“Can I… help?”

“As if I could keep you from bankrupting yourself out of some notion of ‘not being a leech’ or whatever,” said Jackie.

“I don’t want to be,” Bea said quietly.

“It’s not even _supposed_ to go up,” said Jackie, either not hearing Bea or deciding it wasn’t worth hashing that argument out again. “Not this year, anyway. But everything is moving so fast. Every landlord from here to Durkillesburg is drooling about the second turnUP headquarters getting dropped right on top of our heads.”

“But that’s not a sure thing yet,” said Bea. “Right?”

“Nobody knows. All the negotiations are going on in secret despite the fact that there are elected public officials in the meetings. So landlords are gambling that they can jack up the prices. So our rent’s going up.”

“That… sucks.” Bea didn’t know what else to say.

“Well. Your girl’s been planning ahead,” Jackie said with a small smile. “I’ve had my name on the list for one of the Towne Centre apartments.”

“That hasn’t been built yet either!” said Bea.

“And the waiting list is already, like, a mile long. I’m not saying this is gonna be the way to go, but it’s one possibility.”

“Yeah.” Bea looked down at her feet as they walked. It did make sense, in the face of impending rentpocalypse, to have an out. Several outs. Bea would’ve thought of that, at one point in her life. She would’ve had multiple plans and would be working towards them. Before she started wallowing. She straightened her back and squared her shoulders. _I can be better than this_ she told herself. “Let me know what I can do to help. I’m — I want to help.”

Jackie gave her a long look and a slight twitch of her mouth that wasn’t a smile. Before Bea could interpret it, Jackie stopped her train of thought. “Hey, let’s eat out. My treat.”

“Let’s eat out and I’m footing half the bill,” Bea said.

“Ass.”

“I am what I am.”

~~~

“You should put your name on the waiting list too,” Jackie said. “Even if you can’t afford an apartment now, it’ll be a couple years before people can even move in. Who knows where you’ll be by then, right?” 

The night was yet young enough for families to fill the little diner they had come to. Jackie had asked the question amid the click and clank of silverware on plates. Bea’s knife and fork paused partway through cutting a piece off a chicken parmesan resting on a bed of spaghetti. Grease and tomato sauce stained her lips. Buying time for a response, she wiped a napkin over her mouth as she looked at Jackie. “Yeah. That. Seems like a good idea.”

“I’m not saying you have to, just… you never know, right?”

“Right. I’m just…” The words were left unspoken. There seemed to be too many of them. Just getting the job at the Glass Factory felt like a fight. Bea hadn’t developed any skills beyond what her parents’ hardware shop had given her. It was either fix crap or… run a business? Which, without a significant source of capital just to tide her over was a non-starter. She had never been interested in running a business to begin with. It just wound up that way.

She wasn’t going to make rent by herself and it felt like crossing the line, asking to continue rooming with Jackie even in a new apartment, regardless what Jackie herself said. Somewhere along the line, Bea had even forgotten how to plan for a future. There was no future to plan _for_.

“I guess I’m worried,” Bea said. “About the future,” she winced at how very lame that must sound.

“Shit, Bea. That’s an improvement over what you usually do.”

“Thank you Jackie. Aren’t you, though?”

“I think everyone is. I’m just glad that I can help people, like, right now.”

“You do that pretty well.”

“Hah!” Jackie huffed, rueful and bitter. “I remember when I thought I was going to grow up to be president or something.”

“You aren’t even eligible until you’re 35,” said Bea. “It’s a bit early to give up on that dream.”

“As if I’d survive the moment the press finds out I’m trans. Like, literally. God, can you even imagine being in charge of this country? I think I’m pretty satisfied keeping to one town.” Jackie looked out the window. “It’s actually nice, you know? Like, on paper I should hate my job. And, I think if I were doing this in, like, a company, I would hate it. Like the only thing I’d be doing is generating revenue for a bunch of investors or something. Justifying my existence though profit generation. But instead, I know that I’m having a direct impact on people out there.” She gestured out the window. “I feel that I’m making their lives marginally better by going to work.”

“I think that you might be an actual good person, Jackie.”

“Please don’t let other people know, I’ve got a reputation.” She sat in silence for a moment. Bea could practically feel Jackie collecting her thoughts. “I don’t know. I like helping people. Especially people in genuine need. And there’s such a vacuum out there and it makes me mad that nobody else sees it? Or at least it seems that way. And it’s so shitty. Everyone seems to be looking up for an authority to make it all better, but either there’s no one up there or no one worth paying any attention to. We’ve got to look around us instead. At each other. The best thing we could possibly do is hold each other up and we don’t. Sometimes I think that means I’m wrong or weird. Or like I’m. I don’t know. Exploiting people in my own way, like helping people makes me feel like I’m better, like I get a high off it and I’m just chasing the high.”

“When you live in the context of an exploitative system, exploitation becomes the default lens in which we view our relations to one another,” said Bea. “That doesn’t make it true.”

Jackie pursed her lips and looked at Bea, one eyebrow raised. “That… was actually insightful.”

“Glad I could exceed your expectations.”

“Two things: one, that’s not nearly what I meant and two, you’re beating yourself up again.”

“I’ve developed a taste for it. I’m in a consenting sadomasochist relationship with myself. Don’t judge me.”

Jackie gave her an extremely unamused look, but said nothing.

Bea felt deflated, and turned to look out the window. Passing traffic rattled the drafty glass in its fixture and made Bea think of the rumble of a train on its tracks. She could imagine the whole diner as a spacious train car, berthed at a stop as it prepared to take them somewhere else. Anywhere else that wasn’t right here. Old Harbor was a mean little place with not very much going for it and there was an air of desperation in the people who lived in it. Which, now that Bea thought of it, pretty much described her as well.

_Okay, maybe I am beating myself up too much,_ she thought for not nearly the first or nearly the last time.

She played with her food a bit, tore a piece off a breadstick from its crummy little plastic basket and nibbled at it in fits. Bea watched as Jackie took off her glasses and pinched the bridge of her nose.

“You okay?” said Bea.

“Fine. Just. Headache. Aren’t these lights too bright?”

“I think they’re the normal amount of bright,” said Bea.

Jackie groaned.

“Maybe it’s an HRT thing?” Bea said.

“Oh, no. I know when those are giving me shit, believe me. I think your mugger might have given me a concussion.”

“I’m really sorry about that. Do… you want to go to a hospital? I think doctors say that if you hit your head you should always get it checked even if it’s just a minor blow.”

“No, Bea. I’m good. It’s just a thing. Not young anymore. Bright lights and loud noises are starting to suck.”

“Wow, this from the person who knows the location of every nightclub in Bright Harbor.”

“You know what there needs to be?” said Jackie. “A club where you don’t dance. Instead you sleep. You lace yourself out real nice, the bouncer lets you in after sizing you up. And it’s got all that good club furnishing inside, like velvet and chrome and marble and shit. And instead of a dance floor it’s a grid of real plush beds. Oh! Bunk beds! And the music is real mellow and ambient and the lights are all soft and dark… it’s not like a sex thing. At least it doesn’t have to be. People just looking to have a good time sleeping. You can go to the bar or whatever and it’s like all the conversations are soft murmurs.”

“People talking about how hard they’re going to rock their sleep,” said Bea.

“Ha ha! Yeah!”

“I’ve got all the best sleep moves. Just need to get a few drinks in me to loosen up.” 

“Oh my God,” said Jackie, giggling.

“After a brutal week of work I needed to get out on the town and blow some steam with a night of hard snoozing.”

“This idea is sounding more and more brilliant.”

“Once summer starts me and the gang are planning a city-wide snooze cruise,” said Bea. “Renting a yacht and bringing in all the best pillows. Every pier, every club, no exceptions. Gonna snore real good.”

“You should license this idea, Bea. Make a killing.”

“No. It’s too good of an idea. I’m not prepared for that kind of fame.”

“It takes a good person to know that about themselves,” Jackie said.

“God knows there’s nobody good who has that kind of fame.”

“Cheers,” said Jackie and raised her frosted plastic glass of orange Fiascola.

~~~

That night, Bea had troubled dreams.

She dreamed of Old Harbor, her perception so wide she could see herself at its ground level, the cracked pavement and the aging, too-close buildings while at the same time she could see it from a bird’s-eye view. The way it doglegged as it followed the curve of the river and how it was dwarfed by the city across the way. She dreamed that the sun was gone, replaced instead by the sullen red glow of an angry fireball that descended from the sky and made a banshee’s wail. Its light bright enough for her to see her surroundings but dim enough that the night and the stars crept in on the edges in a bizarre, phantasmagoric twilight, red and purple dancing in the edges of her vision as if she were constantly on the threshold of losing consciousness.

There were people around her, which Bea knew on some level beyond her senses because she could neither see or hear them, yet she knew they were there. Shapes moved in gaping windows. The fireball bore down on Old Harbor and as it closed in it screamed like metal grinding against concrete. Bizarre structures lurked on the fringes of the town. They were spindly and white, bonelike and infuriatingly familiar, tickling her brain like an itch she couldn’t reach.

Then she woke up with her alarm ringing in her ear and a kink in her neck from sleeping on the couch wrong. The memory of her dream stuck with her as few did. She walked to the Glass Factory in a dark haze of a mood and she glanced up once at the urban horizon for structures made of bone.

~~~

The stage had been struck down overnight and the floor was now clear. Bea could pretend that the whole thing had never happened, if she were interested in running away from her problems. Which she was. So she did. Ah, the morning just got marginally better.

Bea and the Janitor hashed out a holiday schedule that would involve more evening and night shifts. Goodbye meager social life, hello sleeping in every morning and marginally better pay. It was a trade-off that Bea could justify. Maybe she’d regret it later, but that was a problem for future Bea. For now, all that was asked of her was to do her job and not get in trouble. This was a thing Bea was sure she could do. No more entanglements with jerks.

In her preoccupation, the hours went by largely unnoticed and she came to the end of her shift feeling restless with energy yet to burn. An uncharacteristic urge took hold of Bea; she wanted to socialize.

Up to the second floor and towards the studio framed by CRTs, Bea went looking for Angus. She reached for the door just as she saw Angus approach from the other side.

“Oh, hey,” Bea started. “You heading —”

“Hi!” said Angus. His voice, normally deep, was pitched high and his lips were drawn back in a grimacing, unnatural smile. He stood in front of the door.

“Yeah,” said Bea. “Hi.”

“Hi,” said Angus. He squared his shoulders. It occurred to Bea he was either going to fight or he was trying to block her view of his studio.

“Hi,” said Bea.

Angus frowned.

“Just wanted to see how far we could keep that going,” said Bea.

“Ha ha,” said Angus.

“Angus, what the hell are you doing?” He was flustered. Bea had never actually seen a facial expression that could be described as “flustered,” but she recognized it instantly on his face.

“Just… standing. Up. To stretch.” Angus raised his right arm half-heartedly over his head and once it got above shoulder-level it made a _crack_ sound that caused Bea to wince and Angus’ eyes to water. “Been a long time. Ow.”

Behind him, within his studio, there was the sound of something bumping against the ground. Bea tilted her head to one side. Angus endeavored to block her view by stiffly raising his left arm.

Bea stared at him levelly. “I’m going to find out what you’re doing, Angus. We can either do this while you still have use of both your arms or not, but it’s happening.”

“Don’t you have work?”

“My shift ended fifteen minutes ago.”

Angus slumped. Bea could hear his shoulder click back into place. Just as he drew in breath to speak, a voice came out behind him.

“Dude, your place is cool and all but I got to get back to —”

Edging around Angus was a person. Bea saw it, the shock of ginger hair, the short, wiry build, the blue and orange puppet box that —

“What,” said Bea.

The guy stopped short and looked at her. “Oh. Crap.”

“Bea!” Angus said. “This is, uh, Gregg.”

“I know,” Bea said curtly.

“We met last night!” Angus said, words spilling like a babbling brook. “At the comedy night and —”

Gregg squeezed past Angus and looked at Bea. Then he looked at Angus. “It’s cool! Uh. She doesn’t need to know. So. I’m gonna. I’m gonna go. Thanks though, dude!” He neatly sidestepped them and Bea watched as he bound down the spiral staircase, taking several steps at once with abandon down to the ground floor.

She turned to look at Angus. She crossed her arms.

“Angus.”

“Okay. So. Like. I have an explanation!” Angus held up his hands

“Oh that’s good. For a moment there I thought I wasn’t going to find out why you were hiding in your studio one of the people I chased last night. Except I was definitely going to find out.”

“Okay, first of all, I was not hiding him.”

“You were blocking me like a high school kid trying to keep his mom from finding the weed stashed in his room.”

“Um. Point. But. You see… first of all, I did not know you were chasing him, okay? The first time I met him was yesterday.”

“ _When I was chasing him_.”

“Which would explain why he was out of breath _but_ I didn’t know that! I just… he approached me while I was at the comedy show and he… asked me a favor… which was to keep that box of his somewhere safe. And. I. Suggested my studio?” Angus shrugged.

Bea was very glad she was doing this at the end of her shift. It would suck if this headache had come on while she was working. “And you suggested this _why?_ ”

Angus bit his lower lip and looked to the side. “Because he’s really hot?”

Bea’s jaw hung slack and she rubbed her eyes with her hands. “Oh my God.”

“Sorry?”

“You know what? Don’t apologize. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. I’m just going to do my job and get a paycheck until I die and anything else is white noise.”

“Oh.”

There was something in his voice that made Bea look at him from between her fingers. “What? What do you mean, ‘oh?’” 

“Well, it’s just… you know him, right?”

“I really don’t.”

“Well you _can_?”

The earnestness in his voice made Bea stop and think. An image of Mae flashed through her head and she just didn't have it in her to lie to Angus “I… know someone who knows him.” Words pulled from her mouth like sailors ripped from the flotsam of their wrecked ship to be tossed into the storm of the unfathomable.

Angus touched his two index fingers together over his abdomen and hunched in on himself, attempting to look sheepish. Though it looked more like he was experiencing abdominal pain.

“Do you think you could set me up on a date? With him? Nothing big, like a lunch date or…” he said, his sentence all in a rush only to trail off in the end.

Bea cast her eyes to the ceiling and groaned.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [tumblr](https://eldritchgarboandcosmicmalloy.tumblr.com)


	6. Ghost Light

In the days following, Bea came to learn that under the facade of tweedy nerdishness, gentle sarcasm and a bedrock of skepticism, Angus was one horny dude.

Every time they crossed paths he would drop at least one laughably unsubtle hint that he would really like, at the soonest available opportunity, Gregg’s deets. Bea couldn’t decide if this was very endearing or desperate. 

“Do you know how hard it is to meet queer men around here?” Angus had said one particularly day, when he had managed to track her down. She was standing on a stepladder, the upper half of her body in a vent duct. This specific duct ran deep into the guts of the glass factory, parts that had been beyond the reach or budget of renovation efforts. As such it would periodically retch up some gray goo that probably came from some undiscovered leak that allowed the river muck in. Once a month someone would have to go in and scrape it out. Apparently, that person was Bea now.

“I don’t know, Angus,” Bea said. She tried not to speak much. Even through her mask the muck still stank. It smelled like a building, if a building could die. “Aren’t there bars? Like, here and across the river?” She raised her hand as far is it could go and brought her chisel down on a particularly stubborn formation of stuff. It splat across her arm and a bit landed on her cheek. She was going to need five hours in the shower after this.

“Okay, I’ll amend that: do you know how hard it is to meet when you’re a consummate introvert? Oh, how do you do, ma’am?”

Bea heard the retreating _clack clack_ of high heels as someone passed them by. She didn’t need to witness the scene to know that Angus definitely doffed his hat.

“So…” Angus said.

“I am. A little bit. Busy.” Bea punctuated her words with strikes from her chisel. There was a bucket in there with her, meant to carry the goo out of the vent. Twisting herself to make the best use of her tools in a tight space, Bea decided the best qualifications for this job was experience as a circus contortionist. And she was very certain that was not on the CV she had sent to the Glass Factory’s HR department.

“Right, right. I’m just saying.”

Was this stuff flammable? Bea had never smelled a swamp but this certainly was what she imagined a swamp must smell like. What if she could put her lighter under it and just burn the whole thing out of the duct? What if she blew the building sky high? What if that wasn’t the worst thing she could do with her life right now? One has time to ponder the important questions, when one is stuck halfway in a vent while one’s friend was pestering one to set them up on a date with some criminal.

“Angus, is this guy really worth it? Hold the ladder for me.”

“I’ve got it. I mean, that’s what I’d like to find out.”

Scraping one last scoopful into the bucket, Bea hunched in her shoulders, breathed out and squirmed backwards.

“Do you need help?”

Bea made a sound that she hoped he would interpret as “no” before finally popping out like a cork. She gasped for breath and the stepladder rocked alarmingly underneath her. Angus kept it steady as Bea regained her balance.

“That seems… difficult,” Angus said.

“I have seven more vents to do,” said Bea. She hooked the bucket on her arm. It was quite heavy.

“Wow.”

Bea looked down at Angus from her perch atop the ladder. He looked up, lips pursed and eyes gone all puppy-dog. Or maybe that was just the thick lens of his glasses. He was holding his hat in one hand clutched to his chest. Bea felt an actual wave of cold pass over her at the sorry sight.

“God. Okay. I will do this thing for you, but you have to promise never to look at me like that again,” she said.

“Like what?” said Angus.

“You know what you’re doing.”

Angus’ face scrunched up in a picture of innocence. “Um. I don’t think I do?”

“Insufferable. Just. Shut up. I’ll see what I can do.”

Angus’ face lit up. He probably wasn’t aware of that either. “Thanks Bea, I owe you.”

“Begone. I have work to do.”

“Shouldn’t you have someone helping you? This seems like a job that would need a spotter.”

“You’d think that, but I think being understaffed is the new being fully staffed.”

“Well. Don’t fall and break your neck. You’ve got a date to set up.”

“I can’t believe I’m doing this.”

“You’re like an angel, Bea.”

Bea narrowed her eyes and she frowned. “Okay, seriously, it’s time for you to go.”

Angus, feeling the shift in mood, put his hat back on. “Um. Right. Just. Uh. Let me know. Okay? Okay.”

With a grunt, Bea returned to her work, tipping the bucket’s contents into a large bin as Angus retreated.

Seven more to go.

~~~

Mostly through stubbornness and spite, Bea managed to put off going to Mae by a whole day more. She was able to justify it to herself; in addition to her other responsibilities she was still assembling that special Halloween studio. It was becoming an Entire Thing. Heavy equipment was due in and some of it involved quite a lot of chemicals. She couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Fiberglass, polyurethane, breathing masks, glycerin, power tools. More than once, Bea had told herself to look all this stuff up on the internet once she had a moment to herself. Each time, however, she was too exhausted from work and forgot about it completely.

The dawdling ended when Angus started with the texting. For a shy dude he could be persistent. If the situation were different Bea would think she was dealing with a stalker. Once she got through this whole thing she was going to have to sit the man down and have a talk about this sort of behavior.

Mae’s studio was in the unfashionable end of the Glass Factory. Hissing pipes emerging through the cracked, bulky walls that made up the claustrophobic corridor looped through her neighborhood of studios. There was less room afforded to exhibits, what installations there were had been placed in niches carved into the cinder block walls. Little porcelain statues from one artist vibrated on their plinths, which was right up against a rattling pipe. Was this place a hazard? Bea wasn’t a fire marshal but if she were one, she would definitely be out writing tickets.

Studio 172 belonged to one Margaret Borowski. Bea had known this for a while but had never bothered checking it out. She had kind of hoped she was done dealing with Mae. Funny how things worked out. 

Real funny. 

Her studio took up a corner at the far end of the factory. A small, treacherous part of Bea was curious just what kind of art Mae could possibly do. Break shit and put it on display? Not to be closed minded, but the girl had hardly demonstrated anything Bea could think of as _creative_.

Bea rounded the corner to 172.

Well. Mae’s entry in the directory said she worked in ink and paper and yes, there was ink and paper.

The studio’s door was framed by great white sheets of what had to be butcher paper, given the size. They were stretched tight over rough wooden frames and protected by plexiglass covers. On the paper were… doodles. Sketches. Scores of them. They filled the white space, crammed together but never overlapping. The effect was actually kind of… intricate.

Bea shook her head and frowned. She was being taken in by the sheer quantity of doodles no better than what a bored middle schooler might produce in a notebook. All the same, she stepped in for a closer look. The ink looked as if it had come from any old ball-point pen, the kind that came in packs of ten hanging from supermarket aisles. The subject matter varied. There were blocks of text; written in a clumsy block letter style with more than a few grammatical errors that made Bea click her tongue. There were landscapes done in a simple flat style that nevertheless remained recognizable. Bea could see the Bright Harbor skyline as viewed from the wharf just outside the Glass Factory. Then there were sketches of the streets and alleys of Old Harbor. Inexplicable drawings of trash cans and broken glass and smokestacks that Bea could only assume held some significance. There was a drawing of roadkill, which was a raccoon with x’s for eyes and its tongue sticking out.

Despite the lack of any coherent theme there was an atmosphere that managed to draw all the doodles together and unify them. These were like pages from a journal. The subject matter might have been random, but there was an intimacy to the way they were approached. Personal observations and musings, private thoughts made public. They ran the gamut from the ordinary (a flat sketch of a shop facade and a sentence next to it: “thought: taco buck makes a supremely alright and cheap taco”) to moments of private grief (a small blurb that read “rip granddad” next to a sketch of a tombstone with a heart over it).

The drawing of Bright Harbor’s skyline had rays radiating from it as if it were shining, yet the buildings were monolithic blocks of black ink that made them looming and threatening. Old Harbor, by contrast, seemed more characterful though the subject matter was low buildings and empty warehouses and abandoned docks. Desolate but… cozy. Like a playground that you had outgrown in a neighborhood you had long left behind. And all throughout the sketches and short sentences, Mae had doodled stars and little figures that Bea recognized as constellations. Tiny flourishes of bats and skulls and moons.

But no humans. Anytime there was a person, they were represented as a cartoon animal-looking thing. Which… was that a stylistic choice or what? It wasn’t _bad_ , just… there.

All in all, it was easy to discount Mae’s work as something frivolous. But if you were willing to show a little more patience, there was a layer of earnestness that made it… _oh God, don’t say authentic, don’t be that person_ , Bea thought to herself. It was honest. Sincere in its lack of significance. Like a streetlight in the middle of the night. Mae’s art was actually a little charming.

Bea frowned. _Whatever_ , she thought to herself, forcing the train of thought off the rails as she reached for the studio door. She tried the handle and it didn’t budge. Locked. Didn’t matter. She had little patience and brought her custodial keys up to the lock. She could… leave a message or something. At least she could tell Angus she tried. She wanted to will her surly mood back into being. This turned out to be easy when she stepped into the studio and stumbled on a shoe. Holding onto the door kept her from sprawling across the floor like a damn fool.

The place was… a mess.

Bea tried to ignore all the little flagrant studio maintenance violations. She wasn’t here as part of her work and Bea was doing her very best to maintain a hard divide between her work time and her free time. Bad enough that so much of her life was dedicated to chasing paychecks, don’t give the bastards the satisfaction of taking more chunks of her life away from her.

The studio was mainly tables, set high for someone to stand at their work save for one desk which held a deactivated laptop. The tables all had cloth draped over them that brushed against the floor, concealing what lay underneath. Garbage spilled out of one end of the tables. Next to an overflowing trashcan with water bottles and Fiascola cans there were paper plates and a couple pizza boxes. The entire studio smelled far too lived in. If it weren’t for the art supplies stacked on top of the tables and filling a cabinet, Bea could have imagined she had entered someone’s awful dorm.

A treacherous little urge to clean up prodded at her brain. She smothered it. There was an abundance of pens and an abundance of paper. She would leave a note. She would turn around. She would walk out. There was a couch with a blanket and a pillow waiting for her. A good, simple plan.

Just as she reached for a pen, the window slid open.

The Glass Factory, appropriately, had windows. Great big vaulting cathedral-like windows that were a throwback to a time when the fruits of labor had been regarded enough to warrant reverential architecture. The windows stretched from ground level to the roof, capped by pointed arches. A Catherine window adorned the factory’s facade that faced the river and when the sun rose it would cast delicate web-like patterns through the window onto the floor. All the windows had been painstakingly restored, but they didn’t play particularly well with the renovations. The studio layout had not taken them into account, so studios would sometimes have a sliver of glass to its own while its neighboring space would be hideously exposed. Exposed as well were the levels of the art center, their structure spanning the windows in a way the original builders had never envisioned and served yet again as a reminder that the art center and the glass factory were ill-fitting bedfellows. Like a child wearing an adult’s suit, the general shape was there but the whole of it didn’t work.

As they needed to be functional, each high-arched window was further divided by panes of glass in wrought-iron frames and hinges that had allowed for ventilation when the factory was in peak production. The art factory, however, needed no such allowance and for the sake of security the frames had been sealed to prevent any part of the window from opening.

So when the glass pane that faced into Studio 172 swung open on creaking hinges, Bea’s eyes widened and she tilted her head in consternation.

Mae, in a litany of cursing and a contortion of limbs, squirmed through the open window and fell onto the studio floor in a heap.

She groaned. “Ow. Tight.”

She stood up, dusted herself off, then turned and bumped into Bea, who had been standing still, silent and staring.

“Holy shit!” Mae jumped back half the length of the studio with her hands up as if ready for a fight. Then her eyes focused and she looked at Bea. “What the hell? I thought you were like a ghost or a burglar.”

“Those windows are supposed to be closed. All the time.” Bea felt her jaw tense involuntarily. _Don’t think about work, don’t think about work._

“I mean, yeah. But I have a knife and it’s sealed with, like, really old putty? It’s not hard to wedge it open. That stuff just flakes off. Someone should probably fix it? I don’t know.” Mae spoke with a gormless innocence that suggested she didn’t realize that it was Bea who’d likely have to fix it.

Bea stifled a groan. This always happened. Every time she ran into Mae she only wound up with more questions than answers. Some new consternation would bedevil her when all she wanted was a life without all the nasty tangles that could snarl up her plans. Mae was a nasty tangle. Mae was the Longest Night lights stored in the attic, wadded up and forgotten for eleven months of the year until it came time to drape them over the house again only to find that they had somehow knotted themselves up even worse than when they had first been stashed away.

“So. Uh. What did you want?” said Mae.

 _Get Gregg’s contact info and leave before your night gets worse_ , Bea told herself. “Okay, right. So —”

“No wait! How did you even get in here?”

“I have keys,” Bea said, playing catch-up to Mae’s train of thought as it leapt the tracks.

“Oh, dang. Janitor keys! You could, like, go anywhere!”

“Right,” Bea said in a flat tone. “Anyway, I need to —”

“You ever go up to the roof?”

“No. Look —”

“It looks really nice up there! There’s, like… at night? All the lights kind of shine down but then they bounce back up? And… I guess it’s like an underglow? And you can see all the way to —”

“Wait, you’ve been up to the roof?”

“Uh. Yeah? Loads of times?”

“That’s restricted! All the doors with roof access are hooked up to alarms!”

Mae endeavored to look sly. It looked to Bea like she was trying to sneeze. “I never said anything about using doors, did I?”

 _It’s happening again! Focus!_ Bea bit back more questions and forced herself back to the one question that would get her out of this studio. “Look, I need your friend Gregg’s contact information. Can you give it to me?”

This put Mae on the defensive. Where she had been talking rapidly, changing subjects like a bee flitting between flowers, she shut up and backed away from Bea. “Why should I tell you that? You trying to get him in trouble? For what happened back then?”

“I try not to think about that whole disaster,” Bea said with tight, clipped words. “I could conduct a master class in suppressing memories.”

“Aw, it wasn’t that bad.”

“Mae, his contact information. Please.” 

“Why do you want it?”

“It’s…”

“I should let you know, he’s, like, not into chicks.”

“Not relevant, thank you,” Bea said through her teeth. “It’s not for me.”

Arms crossed and lips pursed, Mae regarded Bea for a moment. Then her expression shifted, brightened. “Wait. Big guy? Adorable hat?”

“You would call it adorable,” Bea said, letting the judgment drip off her words.

“I didn’t call it that! Gregg did! He was, like, totally talking about that dude for days! He totally wants that ass, dude!”

“Goddammit.”

“Well?”

“ _Mae_. Okay. Yes. He asked me to ask you to ask your friend.”

“This is perfect! Gregg’s been totally wanting to see that dude after the other night.”

“So why didn’t he?” said Bea. “He doesn’t really strike me as the kind of person who fails to act on his impulses.”

“I’m going to pretend that’s a compliment,” said Mae. “But… Gregg… is complicated.”

“I’m sure.”

“He is! Plus he has as much right to be as nervous as anyone else when it comes to relationships, okay?”

Bea sighed. “Fair.”

“But this is great! I mean, the other dude —”

“Angus.”

“Angus must be totally down with Gregg too if he asked you to… oh man, we’ve got to set our boys up, Bea!”

“Not our boys and that’s what I’ve been trying to do —”

“We’re gonna set them up. They will have adorable dates. And we’ll spy on them and —”

“This is taking a turn.”

“We’ll, like, hide in the bushes while they’re getting lattes at an open-air cafe and eavesdrop on them being gross and cute at each other —”

“Putting myself down as a strong ‘no’ on this course of events,” Bea said. “Do you seriously stalk your friends?”

“Depends on how much I’ve got going on in my life at the moment,” Mae said breezily. “So what do you say?”

“I’m not in the habit of trailing people like a creep.”

“Well _I’m_ not in the habit of giving out my best bro’s contact info like a narc.”

“Just give me his phone number! I’ll give it to Angus and…” _I can wash my hands of all this_ “He’ll take it from there. I’m sure.”

“Is he a shy nerd?” said Mae.

“Ugh. Maybe?” _Yes_.

“Gregg says he’s a shy nerd. Totally gonna waffle on the call, I bet. No good. We gotta get them, like, physically together!”

“This is not a romantic comedy, Mae.”

“God, I hope not. But I know Gregg. He’s… he’s gonna drag his feet. He doesn’t… well, whatever. The point is I don’t want my boy moping around and I bet you don’t want the same, so we gotta be the ones to set up the date and we gotta do it without them knowing. Because I think that will be funny.”

Bea closed her eyes. “Just… give me his phone number?” she had to try. At least once more. Mae was a nuisance who didn’t let up. Something like this should be easy, but then Mae gets thrown into the equation and suddenly it wasn’t about easy anymore. She just had to make it more.

“Nope.” Mae said, looking smug and terrible.

 _Find a compromise. Not like you haven’t been doing a lot of that,_ Bea grumbled at herself. “I’m not going to… okay, look. We can… I’m not spying on anyone but we can…” God. Had it come to this? “We can arrange, like, a lunch date. We can be, you know, chaperons.” Maybe it was presumptuous to assume that Angus needed watching, but Bea had a close approximation of fondness towards him, which was about as near to like as she felt she could manage. All she knew about Gregg was that he was a thief.

“Gonna have to be a proper lunch. No cafe. I can’t stand the places.” Mae had already taken the idea and run with it. “Anyplace in mind?” Bea started when she realized the question was directed at her.

“Um. No.”

“That’s fine, I know all sorts of places. Holy crap! This is kind of cool! We should go get Gregg right now.”

“What? No!”

“Why not? It’ll just take a second.”

“He’s here? I mean — no!”

“Dude, he works on the docks. And again why not?”

“Because…” Bea actually could not think of a reason. 

Mae skirted around her to the studio door. “It’s, like, the end of his shift probably? I don’t know. I don’t know how that works. Time is hot garbage. I hate it. Like, time? Not a fan. It’s all kind of garbage.”

“Okay,” said Bea. “Let’s please just do this. Quickly.”

“Sure. I’ve got, like, a million things to do anyway.”

Mae opened the door and Bea followed, switching off the lights as she left the studio. Turning her neck to give Mae’s hanging sketches one last look, Bea couldn’t help but indulge her curiosity. “So why are there, like, animals?”

“What?” Mae shot her a perplexed look before following her eye towards her own art. Mae winced. “Oh. Uh. They’re easier to draw than people. Like the best I can manage is stick figures. Ugh. Please don’t look too closely. They’re embarrassing.”

“Really.” It was a departure from Angus. And really most of the artists in the Glass Factory, none of whom seemed to shut up about their work, whenever Bea was in a position to be subjected to that kind of talk.

“Yeah,” said Mae, and stayed silent after that. It was good for Bea to know how she could get Mae to stop talking. This was vital intelligence.

Contrary to her expectations, Bea was led by Mae to a restricted access door. It was always locked, but Bea had the key and it was a shortcut to the outside that she could take when she was stuck on this end of the building but didn’t feel like walking all the way to the other end to get outside.

She was about to open her mouth to say it’s locked and there was no way she was opening it for Mae because Bea was an employee and Mae was a tenant and there were boundaries or at least there should be _dammit_ when Mae shouldered it open and the fading evening light streamed in.

Mae looked over her shoulder at Bea and completely misread the expression on Bea’s face. “Shorter this way.”

There were a lot of things Bea could have said to that, and the words crowded at her throat threatening to spill out like bodies flooding a narrow Spanish street during the Running of the Bulls. While her mouth was sorting itself out, Bea looked at the door latch, which had been covered with a strip of tape.

“ _You_ were the one doing this?” she said. This girl was basically crawling into every nook of the building unchecked.

“Yeah!” Mae said, utterly shameless or clueless or — Bea couldn’t decide which. “Well, Gregg’s the one who pops the lock for me. I keep it taped up so I can use it. At least until someone takes the tape off.”

“Yes.” Bea said through her teeth. “Me. I’m the one.”

“Oh, nice,” said Mae. “Could you stop doing that? Gregg gets pissy when I ask him to pick locks for some reason.” She walked blithely towards the docks.

Bea followed, visions of her hands around Mae’s neck dancing in her head.

~~~

The pier in the evening was a restful place, which Bea was starting to appreciate as she adjusted to her late shift. The sun was settling down from being a giant flaming death ball blasting blinding light onto the devastated world, so that was a plus. So too were people retiring; save for pairs and groups lingering at a particularly fancy seafood restaurant that was — to Bea, anyway — an absolutely infuriating mix of modern minimalism with an austere glass facade framed with brushed steel and twee tiki kitsch with a thatch roof, gas-powered faux torches and what sounded like a loop of bongo drums played through concealed, tinny speakers. Bea hoped that it would some day slide into the river and that she would be there to see it.

Out on the water, boats drifted. Bea was not a nautical person, she had to assume that these vessels served some kind of purpose and weren’t just randomly bobbing on the soft waves like a bunch of morons, but Bea was feeling cranky and any other interpretation would require an investment of faith she could not back.

Mae pointed out a wooden pier that extended from the wharf and ran parallel with it some ways into the river. It was broad, sturdy and lined by a metal rail. A gate swung open as a passenger boat puttered up alongside. Deckhands aboard the boat and standing at the pier exchanged ropes, securing the boat and lining it up to the gate. The evening fade accelerated and night seemed to rush in. The wharf was awash in the harsh light of electric lamps. As the boat idled the thump of its engines and the heavy sting of diesel exhaust washed over Bea. The metal gate clanged in its hinges as unsteady tourists disembarked, shepherded by deckhands who murmured gratitude as one of their number held out a tip jar.

“We’re just in time for the last boat of the day,” said Mae. “There’s, like, a night tour? Then there’s the water taxis which stay out til midnight, but Gregg’s not doing any of those. I think he told them he had, like, a medical condition. Moon allergies? I don’t know.”

Feeling there was little she could add to this enlightening conversation, Bea followed wordlessly as Mae approached the boat, upstream of the current of tourists getting off. She raised her hand over her head, but owing to the fact she was shorter than some pre-teens, this didn’t accomplish much.

“Hey! Gregg!” she said, and that yielded better results.

One of the shadowed deckhands stepped away from his position, causing a little old lady to briefly stumble on the shifting gangplank before someone else caught her. The shock of ginger hair caught the buzzing light, and soon Gregg was there in a bright blue company polo with a red life jacket draped over his shoulders.

“Hey, dude,” he said when he looked at Mae. “Hey… you…” he said when his eyes drifted over to Bea.

“Dude!” said Mae. She thumped him on the chest to get his attention focused on her. “We got good news!”

Gregg looked between Mae and Bea. “We’re not getting arrested?”

“That’s like, water under the bridge,” said Mae. “The distant past. Move on for real.”

Bea wouldn’t have characterized it as such, but she was too tired to raise any objection.

“Okay,” said Gregg. He relaxed, shoulders slouching. “So if this isn’t a red alert emergency situation, can we eat while we talk? I spent half my shift thinking about how I’d kill for a Wart Dog.” Gregg shrugged off his life vest and chucked it onto the boat.

“Oh, dude, good call. You want a Wart Dog?” Mae said, directed at Bea.

“Absolutely not.”

“Doooo you know what a Wart Dog is?” said Gregg. He and Mae walked ahead and Bea followed.

“No.”

“What?” said Mae. “Do you even live here?”

“I have for two months.”

Mae blinked. “Huh. I kind of figured you were, like, born here.”

“Were you?”

“God no. I’m from the mountains. Past Briddle? Er. Or past Durkillesburg, if you don’t know where Briddle is.”

Bea frowned. “I know where Briddle is.”

This seemed to rock Mae, and she give Bea a look. “Whoa. Really?”

“It has the prison.”

“Oh, yeah. True.” Mae turned to face the front and hummed to herself for a moment.

“What made you think I was from here?” said Bea.

“I don’t know,” Mae said with a shrug. “I kind of got that vibe.”

“Vibe?”

“I don’t know,” Mae repeated and threw in a wiggly hand gesture to emphasize the magnitude of her not knowing. “You, like, you’re kind of stylish and kind of moody.”

“Mae thinks everyone from the city has excellent fashion and is extremely depressed,” said Gregg. “Basically everything she knows about city folk come from magazine covers.”

“Shut up, Gregg!”

“I’ve only worn work clothes to this place,” said Bea.

Mae looked at her, then looked away. “I mean. It’s not about clothes.” She sniffed with disdain. “Obviously. It’s just…”

“A vibe,” said Bea.

“Yeah. A vibe.”

They left the wharf and its docked boats behind, following the riverbank north. Bright Harbor was across the river and glowing. The effect was strange and dreamlike; this massive city, which Bea knew to be sprawling and dense and filled with more people than she had ever met in her lifetime, was completely encompassed in her sight. This thing, in all its magnitude, could never be captured in any singular abstraction was now captured in a very literal sense by a single glance. All the varied potential, all the joy and the suffering and the struggle and the decadence of a city and she could see it all from her vantage point on the opposite side of the river. It was like looking up at a dark sky to see the ribbon of the Milky Way. No one person could hope to comprehend the scope of what they were seeing; the number of stars, the sheer mass and majesty of them, yet they could see it. And maybe that meant something. Or maybe it meant nothing. Bea wasn’t sure.

It looked nice, though.

The path along the river curved and a line of buildings blocked their view of Bright Harbor. They were coming to a newer part of Old Harbor. Well-lit modern condominiums with banners draped over them advertising rooms available were a stark contrast to the leaning brick row houses Bea was used to. Even the lampposts were fancy as all hell. A stark contrast to the aging yellow sodium lights in her neck of the city, bright white LEDs were nestled in a lattice work of finished aluminum that sprouted from the ground like a tree. Even the sidewalks were nice: clean slabs of white concrete that popped from the fresh paved black asphalt road. The transition from what she knew as Old Harbor to this more affluent area was stark. Surely it hadn’t been here when she first came to the city? She hadn’t ventured out much, too wrapped up in her misery, but this was new stuff. Stuff that seemed to have stamped itself over Old Harbor like a patch. Bea was reminded of video she had seen of lava on some Pacific Island that rolled over streets and cars. Inexorable, slow expansion of an alien extrusion from a part of the world that Bea was wholly unfamiliar with. She felt like she stood out in a way that made her feel self-conscious. Even the sounds were muted here, as if the neighborhood was screening out the stuff that wasn’t their kind of noise.

“Do you, uh, live here?” she said with doubt evident in her voice.

Gregg and Mae looked at each other, then Gregg snorted. “Holy God, no. Nobody worth knowing lives north of the docks.” Gregg looked away from the condos and his expression brightened. “Oh nice, he’s still here.” He stepped off the sidewalk and crossed the street. 

On the other side, under one of those fancy lights, a large blocky vehicle idled. A black and yellow mural airbrushed on its broad side: a murder of crows devouring a single hot dog and above it all two words scrawled in jagged yellow-white electric lettering, “Wharton’s Dogs.” Steam from an exhaust pipe on top of its roof caught in the light as a curling plume. A question mark in the air that Bea found herself relating to in a powerful way.

“Wart Dogs,” said Bea. A question. A statement. A plea for more information.

“When I die, I want to be a Wart Dog,” said Gregg.

“Dude, I would not be able to eat a Wart Dog made of you,” said Mae.

“That’s okay. Throw me on the street and leave me for the birds so that I may join the sky.”

“That’s so beautiful, dude.”

Bea was rapidly learning the best way to deal with these two was to dispense all pretense. “What the hell is Wart Dogs?” she said.

“Best hot dogs either side of the river, dude,” said Gregg. “Like, foodies and their truck scene can all go to hell, but I’ll legitimately do a crime for one of these.” They came up to the truck. For such a great product, Bea couldn’t help but notice there was no line.

“Which is cool because you kind of are!” said Mae.

“What?” said Bea.

“Doing a crime. This truck is unlicensed. For food, that is. It’s got a regular license for being a truck.”

“Pirate food truck!” said Gregg.

“From the depths of hell!” said Mae.

“Could you guys. Um. Not say that stuff out loud.” Standing at the food truck’s service window was a young man with a nasally voice and big, staring eyes. He wore a gray cap on top of straight, black hair in a bowl cut. He was gangly and pale and in the harsh light. He kind of looked like he had the face of a snow owl.

“Hey Germ, fancy seeing you in this part of the city,” said Gregg.

“We like to work under the shadows of cops,” said Germ. “It usually takes about 15 minutes before someone looks out a window and calls them on us. You caught us just before we were gonna pick up stakes.” 

“You do a lot of business in 15 minutes?” said Bea.

Germ blinked at her owlishly. It took a moment for him to answer. “We get a lot. They know where to wait.”

“They have a secret route and everything,” said Mae. “They don’t even post it online, you just gotta know where to find it.”

“Huh,” said Bea.

“It’s an okay way to sell hot dogs,” said Germ. “There aren’t many ways, so this is an okay and interesting way.”

“Okay,” said Bea. “Weird.”

“Germ’s family has history in Old Harbor,” said Mae. “Germ is good people.”

“So, still got time for, uh, three? Three dogs?” said Gregg. Germ nodded and passed the order on behind him.

Bea mulled it over quickly and decided she could afford to indulge this a little. May as well.

Men working behind Germ quickly assembled their food, then one of them went up to the driver’s seat and by the time the three had paid for the hot dogs, Wharton’s Dogs was already pulling away from the curb. Mae waved as the truck vanished around a corner. They found a bench alongside the sidewalk and sat at it.

“I never sat at a bench with, like, individual armrests,” Mae said. “This is fancy as shit.” There were two armrests in the middle; along with the two that capped the bench at both ends it left room for four people to sit.

“It’s an anti-homeless bench,” Bea said between bites. The hot dog was actually quite good. She was willing to attribute it to the sauce.

“Anti how?”

“It keeps them from sleeping on it.”

“What the hell.”

“Told you this place sucks,” said Gregg.

Mae shifted in her seat as if it were suddenly crawling with ants.

“So… what’s going on? Why are we talking?” said Gregg.

Silence followed. Bea waited for Mae to jump in as she seemed wont to do, but a quick glance told her that Mae was suddenly very preoccupied with glaring at the armrests on the bench as if she could melt it with a look. Bea closed her eyes, sighed, then opened them again. This was on her.

“You met my friend, Angus.”

“Oh. Yeah! He was cool.”

“He wants to meet again.”

Gregg boggled. A dollop of sauced dripped from his hot dog onto his uniform. “Oh. Cool. Cool.”

She leaned away and looked at him. “Do you not want to?”

“What? I totally do! I just didn’t expect it?”

More silence. Gregg was staring into space in a daze and Bea was looking at him with a raised eyebrow that was increasingly gaining altitude. “So you… work at a tour boat?”

“I’m a deckhand,” Gregg said automatically. “I go on the rides, make sure nobody falls over and drowns. Mostly I just hose down the deck and stuff. It’s kind of a garbage job. So he wants to meet again?”

“That’s a thing I said, yes.”

“Huh. I didn’t…”

He let the sentence trail off and fade. Bea breathed in deep and let out a long, long breath. She wanted a cigarette, but there was something intensely nauseating about the smell of tobacco smoke and hot dogs intermingling. So she sat in place, one leg jumping up and down with the agitation she hadn’t notice mounting within her. She felt silly, sitting on a bench at the side of the road setting up dates like this was high school. Or treating this boy like they were sitting at a job interview. It was starting to undo her chill.

“Okay! Let’s do this!” said Gregg. “Um, you got a pen I can write down my number? Maybe you can give to him?”

“Just… tell me your number. I’ll put it on my phone and text him.”

“Oh, right, right.”

As they did that, Bea felt a twinge of relief. This weird night was nearing its end. She could sleep. Her limbs were aching from work and then she had this to deal with. If there were justice in the world she’d be canonized for her divine patience.

With the end in sight, her leg went still, agitation leaving. So it was weird that she still felt the bench vibrate.

“Hey Mae,” she said as she finished punching in Gregg’s final digit. She looked up. “Could you stop — oh my God what the hell are you doing?”

While Bea had been occupied, Mae had kept herself busy by vandalizing the bench. The slats of the bench were wood, but its metal frame, like everything else in this neighborhood, was made from brushed aluminum. It looked sleek and modern, but Bea had worked with it enough at the Glass Factory to know that it wasn’t nearly as sturdy as steel. Knowing the trick to it, someone could pop the joints out as if they were playing with children’s building blocks.

And Mae seemed to know the trick to it because she had just popped off one of the armrests.

“Mae! Stop!” said Bea. “Can you literally not go outside without destroying something?”

“I’m fixing the bench!”

“You can’t —”

“Hey! You kids!”

Bea supposed she could not fault some random passerby mistaking her for a child. It was dark. And they were engaged in some childish vandalism. She looked up to see someone with a phone in one hand and a dog leash in the other, a bushy little Yorkie straining excitedly against the end of it.

“I’m calling the police!” said the dog walker.

“Mae, let’s go,” Bea said firmly, standing up and turning away from the street.

“Shh! No names!” said Gregg. “Yeah, dude, we should leave.”

“I’ve almost got the last one!” said Mae. She punctuated each word with a palm striking the side of the armrest.

“Seriously, _let’s go_!” Bea said through her teeth.

“What? She said she’s calling the cops. She’s not going to do anything herself.” Mae said. “People like her never do. Got it!” She raised the last armrest triumphantly. “Okay, now I’m done.”

They left, their shoulders hunched while the dog walker called out something dismissive towards them. As if to fully round out this weird, juvenile night, Bea felt like she was relieving a delinquent youth phase she never actually had. Once they cut across to the familiar sight of the wharf did she feel at ease. It turned out tangling with authority — or the threat of authority, in this case — made Bea feel queasy; it was almost embarrassing how such a minor confrontation gave her a shot of adrenaline. Or it was the unlicensed hot dog.

Mae had held on to the armrests, brandishing them as trophies. “That was fun! I had fun! Whaddaya all want to do next?”

“I’m leaving,” said Bea. “Don’t have a reason to stick around.”

Gregg nodded. “It’s late for me, dude. I gotta do a morning shift.”

“What? I thought you told these guys not to put you on evening and then morning hours!” said Mae.

“Yeah, Mae, they kind of do it anyway. Because they can.” Gregg sounded tired for the first time Bea met him.

“That sucks, dude. You work for sucky people.”

“I noticed that too. Oh, I just remembered I didn’t clock out of my shift. Gotta do that. See you Mae.”

“Message me when you get to bed!” Mae turned and seemed to realize she was now alone, with Bea already taking the road south out of the harbor. “Uh, see you later! Bea!”

Bea did not turn back to acknowledge her, only giving a grudging grunt which Mae probably didn’t hear anyway. As she walked, she looked down at her phone. She dodged pedestrians with practiced ease as she went through a short chain of messages from Jackie who was starting to worry Bea had been abducted. Bea tapped out a short reply and pocketed the phone. She walked through Old Harbor. The Old Harbor she had come to know: cracked, broken and leaning against itself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [tumblr](https://eldritchgarboandcosmicmalloy.tumblr.com)
> 
>  
> 
> so like,
> 
> with this chapter, glass factory is novel length, as well as longer than rite of spring, the last story i wrote. and it's still got a lot further to go. there's a lot i wanna do with this.
> 
> like, a lot. lot lot.
> 
> thank you everyone for sticking with me for this long. your patience is profoundly appreciated. gonna do a little housecleaning. update tags and do something with the story summary, which i have always hated. thank you for reading!


	7. Stuck Together

Moments like this were rare in life, Bea decided. And thus, they were meant to be cherished.

Bea stood at an annex space off to the side of the Glass Factory’s front entrance foyer, her stance wide and her hands on her hips. This portion of the floor had been fenced off with high plywood walls, “CAUTION: CONSTRUCTION” signs posted at regular intervals. Before her were all the studio partitions she needed, the furnishings, the tools and chemicals that the artist had requisitioned.

Everything was in place. Like a chef at her station with all her ingredients measured, portioned and prepared, Bea had everything she needed to get the job done. No more, no less. A perfect, closed system that only required time and effort applied to it to turn plans into concrete reality.

If life could feel this ordered more often, Bea wagered there’d be a hell of a lot less awfulness. She felt like a kid who had been given an entire playset to put together. Bea was so satisfied with all this that though she was perfectly aware how lame she sounded, she did not give a damn.

“Reckon that’s about everything,” drawled the Janitor, who came up behind her with a Fiascola can in one hand, the other hand hooked around his toolbelt.

“Yeah,” said Bea. “I think I can have all this put together before the end of my shift.”

The Janitor made a thoughtful noise. “That’d be nice, but you don’t gotta finish this until the weekend.”

“I have two days off after today, so I’d like to get it done. Otherwise it’ll be all I can think of.”

“I can understand that,” said the Janitor with a nod. “Two whole days, huh?”

“In a row,” said Bea.

“Your cup runneth over. What you planning to do with all that time?”

“Absolutely nothing.”

The Janitor guffawed. “You kids. Always figured you all had busier social lives, but every time I hear a youngin’ talking about their free time all they want to do is stay home.”

“Social lives are for people with money.”

“Ain’t that the way,” said the Janitor. “Well. Don’t wanna cut into your time, so I’ll leave you to it. I got a recycling chute that needs to be unjammed.”

Bea winced. That chute was one of many banes of the job. Too often it jammed, and unjamming it was an involved process that included physically entering the chute, holding onto the rim while dangling most of your body weight off the edge and kicking at the trash with one leg until it slid down and out. Someone was probably going to break their neck doing that eventually.

“Good luck,” she said.

“Think I’ll read up on our workers comp afore I do,” said the Janitor. He walked off with a wave.

Assembling the studio was a lot like fitting a jigsaw puzzle together. The pieces were larger than Bea and in some cases weighed more than she did. But she had experience hauling hardware goods off of trucks and into her family store for years before coming to Old Harbor. She had learned that it was all about leverage. At least here she had air conditioning. The work wasn’t difficult so much as it was time consuming. This studio was elaborate. There were the outer walls, a couple inner chambers, doors and windows to install. The real frustration for Bea were the shelves. There were a hell of a lot of shelves and she had to drill the holes for those herself. It was fiddly, detailed work. By the time she was finished, air conditioner or no she was overheated and a little cranky. A good time for her lunch break.

When she came back, it was time to supply the studio. This meant a little bit more than throwing a few paint brushes around. 

Its stock included various polysyllabic chemicals. There was also liquid silicon, a vacuum pump, a table saw, tools of the cutting and poking variety, safety equipment and wooden frames of different sizes. By the time Bea had unloaded the carts and put everything in its place, she was tired, aching, her legs protested and she felt the faint throb of what was likely to become a migraine later in the evening. Her earlier energy had long fled, but she was done and that carried with it a sense of satisfaction that momentarily blotted out her complaints.

Moving to a ten gallon bucket of polyurethane, Bea sat on it and rested. The Janitor had tended to the Black Goat and other responsibilities. It was likely that something somewhere needed fixing, but no one could see her here so she allowed herself this highly illicit break. Being there, concealed by plywood walls gave her an odd, comforting feeling. Like she was a kid again hiding under a fort of blankets and couch cushions.

And it just had to be now, when that feeling swept through her and wrapped itself around her like a cozy blanket. It was amazing how a person could pursue some nostalgic childhood comfort only to have it surprise them like a lion lying in wait in the tall grass. It was a moment of tired contentment so satisfying that Bea knew that if she could bottle that feeling up and sell it for use she’d never have money problems in her life again. Soon it would pass, surely it would have to. Like a dream in which one suddenly realizes they’re dreaming. Bea held her breath as if she could savor the moment before it left her. It struck her how out of her control her emotional state was. Was everyone like this? Did everyone grind out the hours and the days in a haze, subject to shifts in their mood as beyond their control as a lightning bolt? Did moods shake them to their bones as a thunder clap, only to roll past just as suddenly?

If so, then what could be done about it? When they wrote “the pursuit of happiness,” did they recognize happiness was an elusive thing bound to whims that had nothing to do with however much people chased after it? By extension, does pursuit even have meaning, when happiness could leave you cold in a moment which should bring joy, only to present itself unbidden later? Or was it just Bea? And she couldn’t know any better because she lacked an outside perspective.

 _God_ , she thought. She felt fortunate that she only got this maudlin after graduating. If she were like this when she were younger she probably would have done something dreadful, like start a blog about it. Bea stood up, stretched until her back popped and shook her whole body into the here and now. Her job was done and her shift had ended and she had a two-day break to look forward to. 

There was still a good chunk of stuff that needed to be carted away now that the studio was completed and stocked, but that was somebody else’s job. As Bea exited the studio, closing the door and noting with satisfaction how it glided soundlessly on freshly oiled hinges, she stopped and turned. One last thing needed attending to. Next to the door of every studio was its number and underneath that, a nameplate for the resident artist. Bea took the nameplate off a cart and slid it into place. She took a step back to survey what could loosely be called her work:

STUDIO 15A  
LORI MEYERS

Leaving, Bea resolved to check the place out on her next workday. This Meyers person must do something impressive to warrant a studio this size.

~~~

Clocked out and eager to get back to Jackie’s and shower off the day, Bea made for her usual exit by the cafe. She had spent her entire shift indoors and was aware of the fact that she kind of reeked. Preoccupied with buttoning her jacket, she became dimly aware of a rhythmic drumming that was growing in volume. Then her shoulders sagged as she saw ripples and tracks of water running down the great windows. It was raining.

 _What the hell? When was that a thing? Of all the times —_

“What do you mean there’s a secret ending?”

In her distraction the voice nearly caused Bea to trip on her own feet. She stopped next to one of the potted plants that had been placed around the cafe. The rain was a forgotten thing, as the sound of the voice made her brain go _oh shit hide before she sees you_. She peered past the plant.

Sitting at a cafe table, Mae was batting a paper cup between her hands, dividing her attention between that and her conversation. The liquid in her cup sloshed, occasionally escaping out the lid’s spout and landing in beads on the table top. Bea was already itching to clean that mess up.

Someone beat her to it. A brown hand holding a neatly folded napkin swiped across the table and cleared out the mess. The hand’s owner was concealed from Bea by the plant but it didn’t take a genius to guess. There was only one person — on the planet, probably — who would wear a tweedy wool jacket like that.

“You have to talk to the guy,” said Angus.

“The guy?” said Mae.

“The guy.”

“I don’t know the guy.”

“You know, he has, like, a bag. And he tells you where the secret room is?”

“I’m blanking here.”

“He shows up right at the start of, uh, the second level? I think?”

“Oh! I always kill him.”

“You what?”

Mae shrugged. “He’s a guy, you can stab him, so I do.”

“But he doesn’t even make any hostile moves at you!”

“Angus, the Demontower is a merciless place. You can’t let anyone get the drop on you. Guys be dropping.”

“But —”

“Guys. Be. Dropping.”

Angus exhaled a low chuckle before delving further into the esoterics of whatever game they were obviously talking about.

Intellectually, Bea knew that her few friends had lives beyond what she could immediately perceive. Jackie had a wider friend circle than just about anyone she knew, from close friends to loose acquaintances who mainly kept her updated on the latest party worth checking out. Bea was only dimly aware of who these people were. She always assumed Jackie never bothered introducing her to them because… well, Bea was quite aware that she could be a drag. Jackie could hardly be blamed for that and Bea held no grudge. Surely Angus had his own social circle totally separate from Bea and that was all well and good.

Thinking that _Mae_ was a part of that circle was… extremely weird. As far as Bea could tell, the two had nothing in common. Angus was an actual teddy bear and Mae was a vandal and petty crook who probably did more to contribute to Bea’s workload than any other agent of destruction that exerted itself upon this building up to and including the all-consuming cosmic force of entropy.

So yeah, it was weird.

Also weird: hiding behind a plastic tree-thing. To eavesdrop on a friend and a very loose, very reluctant acquaintance. So was —

“Bea?” Angus called out to her.

 _Shit_. Bea cursed at how predictably she had got caught out. How had she committed the most predictable social flub like the most gormless sitcom protagonist dullard? Running wasn’t even an option. These people literally knew where she worked.

She closed her eyes before stepping out from her hiding place. Somehow that made things better. Like pushing the reset button on this whole mortifying deal. Then she opened her eyes as if seeing them for the first time.

“Hey,” she said.

Mae grinned. It was not, in Bea’s estimation, a particularly kind grin. Then Mae shot a glance towards Angus the same time he shot a glance at her and _what the hell was that about_.

“Hey,” said Mae. “How you doing? Over there?”

Bea clenched her hands into fists. “Fine,” she said. “Just got off work, so I’m leaving.”

“I can see that,” said Mae, with the same grin still there. Bea kind of wished she could vanish. Or Mae could. Either way would work.

“Come on over,” said Angus. It occurred to Bea that Angus was being charitable and that was awful.

“Sure,” she said tightly. Just… be cool. She weaved around the few tables between them, then pulled up an empty chair. She couldn’t really hide the simple relief of getting off her feet.

“Long day?” Angus said with a sympathetic look.

“Um. Yeah. Finally finished a project I’ve been dealing with for, like, a while. So that’s good. But yeah, tired.”

Midway through bringing his own cup to his lips, Angus hesitated. It was brief, but Bea caught it. So did Mae, who smacked him on the shoulder.

“Come on, dude. Ask her!”

“I… was going to,” Angus said, which was so transparently false Bea almost laughed.

“Do go on,” she said.

“Okay. Um.” Angus adjusted his glasses. “So. Like. Would it be… cool? I mean, we set up this, like, this thing? We’re doing. A thing. To. Do.”

Bea said nothing. She was absolutely fascinated. She was listening to a sentence disintegrate in real time.

“Dude!” said Mae. “Fine, I’ll do this.” She turned to Bea. “So, remember when you gave him Gregg’s number? Well, they totally texted each other and now they’ve got a date set up!”

“Wow,” said Bea. She looked at Angus. “Honestly didn’t expect you to make a move so soon.”

“Pft, he didn’t,” said Mae. “ _I_ did. I just knew they weren’t gonna get the ball rolling, either of them. So I spent all day tracking Angus down and telling him to talk to Gregg. It was, like, a total adventure. Had to talk to a bunch of people. Broke into an office. Got chased by a cop! It was a whole deal. I’m surprised I didn’t run into you.”

Bea raised an eyebrow at Mae. “I was busy.”

“Must have been. So yeah!” Mae looked at her expectantly.

Bea looked between Angus and Mae. “Con…gratulations?” she offered.

“We’re going as a group, didn’t you remember what we talked about last night?” said Mae.

“Oh,” said Bea. She did, in fact, remember. She was hoping everyone else had forgot. “Well…”

“It’s not really a date thing,” said Angus. “I think it might be a bit too early for that? But… you know, a group thing might be more, uh, appropriate.”

Mae snorted. “Get a load of Captain Manners over here. Next you’ll be measuring skirts to make sure they’re not showing too much ankle.”

Angus gave her an indulgent smile. Then he turned to Bea. “You don’t have to come… uh, you seem pretty tired.”

“Okay, well, I’m tired now but when is this date-not-date?”

“Tomorrow evening?” said Angus.

Bea scratched her chin. This was a social obligation she hadn’t thought would be cashed in so soon. Or at all, honestly. And it landed right on one of her days off. There was no real gracious way to bow out. Besides, it wasn’t like this was a completely unpleasant activity. Going out. With people. In a social context. It wasn’t like this was torture or something. Nobody was driving iron nails through the webbing between her fingers or whatever.

“Okay, I can do that.”

“Good!” Angus said. He smiled. “Meet here at 4, then? We’re gonna go out for something to eat, just hang. Should be fun?”

“We can only hope,” said Bea. She looked at Mae. “So you’re coming?”

“Duh. It’s gonna be great.”

“Great.”

“I promise it will be great.”

“Okay.”

“Nice!” said Mae, and jostled the table with her elbow, sending her cup toppling over. Brown liquid dribbled onto her sleeve as she scrambled to right the cup.

“Aw man,” she said. “I got it all on my… hot chocolate doesn’t stain, does it?”

Bea snorted. “Hot chocolate?”

“Yeah. What? I don’t drink coffee. Caffeine fucks me up. Hang on, I’m gonna grab some more napkins.” She scooted her chair back, the legs scraping noisily on the floor. Bea leaned back in her seat and crossed her arms.

“So how long have you two known each other?” said Bea.

“Like, two hours I guess?” said Angus.

“Really? You make friends easy.”

“Ha ha. No, not really. It was her mostly. She seems friendly.”

“She’s a menace.”

“Aw, I don’t know.”

Maybe Angus had a weakness for that kind of person, Bea thought.

“She seems cool,” Angus was saying. “We played a lot of the same video games when we were younger. And, you know, she’s friends with Gregg so I figured I should give her a chance. You should too! She’s nice.”

“She’s pushy.”

“Sometimes pushy is good. I know for a fact I wouldn’t have worked up the courage to ask Gregg out on my own. Even when I had his number. Uh, thank you for that, by the way. I owe you big time.”

“Mm,” said Bea. “Well it sounds like Mae wound up arranging the whole thing. So you don’t actually owe me at all, but don’t let me stop you from declaring a life debt to me. Always wanted one of those.”

When Mae returned, she had mostly succeeded in smearing the stain further down her sleeve. She gestured at the windows. “It’s really coming down out there,” she said. 

Bea looked past Mae. Broad rivulets of water streamed down the window, catching the light of streetlamps and tracing golden outlines.

“I don’t have an umbrella,” she said.

“I’ve got one,” said Angus. He picked it up off the ground. It was a tiny thing, wholly inadequate for two people. “Do you mind sharing?”

“I’m out past River Bend,” said Bea.

“Oh,” said Angus, “I live west, close to the highway.”

“Okay, that’s basically the exact opposite direction. I’ll just wait the rain out.”

“You sure?”

“It’s cool. What about you?”

“I’ve gotta get back to my place,” said Angus. “I have a, uh, appointment.”

“He has a raid scheduled with his guild,” said Mae. “Gotta fight dragons and shit.”

Bea cracked a smile, Angus looked abashed. “Well,” Bea said. “At least one of us has actual plans.”

“It’s an… important raid, you know? We’re shooting to be first on our server.”

“Go get those dragons then,” said Bea.

“It’s the Necrolord of the Forgotten Fathoms, but thank you.” Angus adjusted his glasses.

“I think a dragon can be a Necrolord,” said Mae.

“Yeah,” said Bea. “I don’t think it’s right to assume a dragon can’t be a Necrolord of the Forgotten Prison.”

“Fathoms,” said Mae.

“Fathoms,” said Bea.

Angus was laughing. “Okay, okay. Well, I’ll let you know if it’s a dragon or not. Stay dry, you kids. If you want a place to chill out, you should feel free to hang out in my studio. I assume you got the keys, Bea.”

“Yeah. Uh, thanks.”

They saw Angus to the exit, where he was pretty much drenched the moment he stepped out, little umbrella feeble against the elements.

“That boy is going to ruin his jacket that way,” said Bea.

“Oh for sure,” said Mae. She nodded firmly and deliberately, the kind of way a child might when talking about something they knew nothing of but didn’t want to give it away.

“Well. See you tomorrow, I guess,” said Bea. She turned away from the door.

“Uh, wait! Where you going?”

Bea looked back. “I think I made it pretty clear I’m going to wait out the rain?”

“Maybe we can, like, hang out?” said Mae. “I mean, we don’t have much else to do, right?”

“Aren’t you going to go home too?”

“I’m good.”

“This place closes eventually.”

“Eh.” Mae shrugged. “I’m good.”

“Okay…?” Bea wondered if she was being unfair. Angus did say to give Mae a chance, something Bea was not inclined to do. She was of the opinion that Angus was too nice for his own good.

“We could… we could look around!” said Mae. “I mean, you’re always working when you’re here, right? But now you’re here and not working. How often have you ever just, like, walked around and looked at the art?”

That was both true and not a terrible idea. It bothered Bea that Mae had thought about it.

“Slow down and stuff,” Mae was saying. “You don’t have to be, like, always doing something.”

“Alright. But I’m kind of done walking around for now.”

They returned to the cafe and sat at their table. The place was empty save for them and once the barrista determined they weren’t there to order, he returned to browsing through his phone behind his cash register.

Once they settled into their chairs, Bea remembered why she seldom tried to “slow down and stuff.” It kind of meant she wasn’t doing anything to occupy her and take her mind off of how her life kind of sucked. And now she’d have to deal with that while this… other person was sitting right across from her.

“So do ya like being a janitor?” said Mae.

Bea let out a breath and gave Mae a flat look. “Yeah, this is definitely the high point of my life.” The sad thing was that this very nearly wasn’t sarcasm.

“Yeah, it seems cool!” Mae said, definitely not picking up on Bea’s tone.

“Does it.”

“I mean, yeah. You’re like, I don’t know. Actually doing something? Like you’re keeping this building from falling apart. That’s really cool. Imagine if you weren’t here, right? This place would suck. It’d smell like garbage and all the shit would be broken and, I don’t know, I bet the river would flood or something. It’s cool that there are people who actively stop all that from happening.” Mae lifted her legs up and sat on her chair cross-legged. She put her elbows on the table. “I think that’s a job that’s really good. Not like ‘oh I made some asshole in a mansion somewhere really rich,’ but like ‘I made a place demonstrably better for people around me,’ you know?”

“Hm,” said Bea. In truth, she had some complicated damn feelings about her job, absolutely none of which she was willing to share with Mae. “I don’t think there’s much we could do if the river decided to flood.”

“Maybe. I know when I’m down in, like, the hallways in the basement, it definitely feels like the river could break through.”

“You should definitely not be there.”

“I haven’t! Not since you told me.”

“Good,” said Bea. “So what do you do?”

“Me?”

“Yes. Do you work? Or are you a full-time student?”

“Oh, uh.” Mae scratched the back of her head, short locks of black and pink hair twined around her fingers. “I kind of sort of have a job. Do you know eGor?”

“Like the guy in the old monster movies?”

“No, the app. I think some guy in California made it? Then, like, turnUP bought it for probably a billion dollars?”

“Not really up on my apps,” said Bea.

“It’s like, somebody subscribes to it, then they put out orders, like ‘I want a cheeseburger’ so then you go out and get that guy a cheeseburger, and he pays for it and you get like, a fee, and that’s your pay. So yeah, that’s what I do.”

“Ah. Gig economy.”

“Is that what they call it? I just know that my job is definitely the ‘make some asshole in a mansion rich’ type.”

“I always imagined it as tough work.”

“I mean it’s not great and the pay’s garbage but it’s basically impossible to be fired.”

“Didn’t some guy get fired after killing a guy? It was on the news.”

Mae rolled her eyes. “Okay, yes, murder is definitely a fireable offense, but short of a violent crime, you’re basically good. It’s just awful pay.”

“I think it’s recommended as an income supplement,” said Bea.

“I suppose. Kind of hard to imagine how it’s supposed to do that when it takes up so much time. It can be cool, though. I go all over the place. You know? Discover new places, new people. One time I had to do a delivery of, like, an entire stuffed deer from an animal stuffing place and bring it to one dude’s home.”

“That sounds heavy.”

“Yeah, it didn’t really work out. I left it on a street corner with a note saying there was a reward for anyone who took it to the right address. Got a complaint from that job.”

“Wow, okay. Guess you meant it about the firing thing.”

“Leaving the note was pretty responsible of me, I don’t know what the problem was. I was basically doing a low-tech version of what the app does.”

“Probably worried that you were piggybacking your own hustle on their hustle,” Bea said.

“Oh, man. Bet you’re right. Do you think I could do that? Hm.” Mae seemed to give this serious consideration.

“Given that you’d have to pay the other person to do your job for you, it doesn’t seem like a sustainable business model.”

“Damn. Yeah. The service fee isn’t nearly enough to divide between two people. It was worth a thought.”

“Did someone use that app to tell you to leave garbage in the furnace room?” Bea said. “Or, I bet that you had to haul someone’s junk away and for some reason you thought that was the best place to stash it.”

“No!” Mae said heatedly. “That was… not why.”

“Then why? If you’re about to say it was some kind of art exhibit I’m going to be very disappointed.”

“Not that either. I don’t know! It just… felt like the thing to do at the time.” Mae threw her hands up. “Do I gotta have a reason for everything I do?”

“I think most people have a driving motivation behind their actions, yes,” said Bea.

“Do they though? Like, really? Is every little thing every person does entirely due to a, like, conscious thought? Ever heard of breathing? We do it all the time and nobody ever has to _think_ about it! Haven’t you ever done something without knowing why?”

Bea was silent and staring down at the surface of the table. The deep-down stains of coffee cup rings like staring eyes.

“No,” she said.

“Oh. Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Bea said with a firmer voice. She looked up at Mae. “Everything I’ve done, I’ve done while fully aware of doing it and fully aware of the consequences.” Her mind drifted back, unwanted, to her past. It had to be that way. She had to have been clear-eyed, when she had made the decisions she had made. Anything less than complete clarity and acceptance was… unacceptable. Unconscionable. Her past life unspooled in her mind’s eye like old film that had snapped from a malfunctioning projector, all of it spilling out for her to reflect on. A life of terrible events and awful decisions playing out in reverse: the moment she left, the claustrophobia of her old life, her arguments with her father, the slow death of her mother, and —

She had traded it all for _this_. A couch at a friend’s apartment. A job with little future and less pay. Every day was one day _gone_. No security, only charity, and how ephemeral that felt. So little to lose, yet how keen the losses were, each one. It was all either a mistake or a judgment. Easier to accept it as judgment. That she had made choices and they were simply wrong choices and this was her punishment. With punishment was the possibility of absolution. It was all she had.

“I made my choices,” Bea said, more to herself than to Mae and with a finality that brooked no debate. Internally, she gathered up the mess of her life’s memories, trying to bring them back under control.

“Man,” said Mae, “I mean, like, even when you’ve got a junk food crave?” Her skepticism irritated Bea, and Mae seemed to finally realize it. She changed subject with the subtlety of a semi-truck plowing through a lane divider.

“So what do you think of Gregg and Angus?” she said. “I think they’d make a cute couple!”

“Mm. I guess we’ll see,” said Bea.

“What about you?” said Mae.

“What about me?”

“You, like, have a boyfriend?”

“What? No.”

“Oh. Girlfriend?”

“No. No one.”

Mae’s brow furrowed. “Why not? You’re, I mean, you’re… pretty. Even when you’re, like, covered in grime and stuff.”

 _Because for the past ten years I’ve felt like I’m trying to outrun an avalanche and if I slow for a moment to stop and talk to someone I’ll get overtaken by all the shit I’m barely able to stay ahead of. Obviously._ Which was far more than she was willing to say out loud.

“Guess I just never had the time,” Bea said. This was all starting to get more personal than she liked. It wasn’t that Mae was _entirely_ unpleasant to talk to. Bea could even concede Angus’ point. For all her prodding, Mae wasn’t really annoying. She seemed… curious. Bea wasn’t used to having that kind of focus on her. “I’m… I’m going to look at the art, I guess,” she said and stood up from her chair. “You said you wanted to do that, right?”

Mae lit up. “Yeah!” Bea wondered at that. Whatever awkwardness was going on seemed entirely one-sided. Mae skated over it all without care or shame. It was kind of enviable.

“You’ve been volunteering for the Halloween deal, right?” said Bea. Talking shop was a relief in contrast to the earlier direction of their conversation.

“Ugh. Yeah. I mean, it’s not even anything cool. They wanted me to make decorations and stuff. But when I did they didn’t like it!”

“Yeah?”

“I drew all sorts of cool stuff. Like badass zombies and shit! They wanted bats and, and pumpkins.”

“A shame.”

“Yeah, a shame! I’m pretty good at drawing, like, demon skeletons and intestines.”

“Demon skeletons,” said Bea.

“Like regular skeletons, but with devil horns. And fangs.”

“Are intestines a Halloween decoration?”

“They are if they’re hanging out of a dude’s corpse!”

“That’s pretty hardcore.”

“I don’t fuck around when it comes to Halloween,” said Mae.

“Obviously.”

“Like, bats are cool too, but look at them!” Mae pointed at a rain streaked window they were passing by. A paper chain of bats hung from the top of the frame.

“They are kind of elementary school, aren’t they?” Bea said.

“Yeah. Well. Whatever. It got Quelcy off my back.”

Bea wondered briefly if she should apologize about that. It was her fault Mae was caught and it sounded like the girl had enough on her plate. She frowned at the thought and shook her head. Whatever. She was in the right and Mae was being a little thief. What even were these thoughts? 

They browsed the studios idly, and Bea had to swat Mae’s hand away more than a few times when she got handsy with the exhibits. It was a peeve of Bea’s that made her want to jump the occasional tourist who couldn’t heed the “DO NOT TOUCH” signs. Like they needed to get their grubby, ketchup-stained prints on the art in order to really appreciate it.

“What got you interested in art?” Bea said as they moved on from a studio that showcased a dizzying amount of very small dog sculptures.

Mae shrugged. “I don’t know if I have an _interest_ ,” she said. “I just like things that look rad.”

“Is that how you approach your own art?”

The expression on Mae’s face puckered like she had just tasted something sour. “I… not really. I don’t know. Dude, I don’t know, okay?”

“You seem uncomfortable talking about your art. I didn’t think you were the modest type,” said Bea. Mae said nothing. It was curious. Bea took the lead, hanging a left down towards the far end of the building. Mae followed.

“So what does inform your art?” Bea said.

“’Inform,’ what are you, an art professor or something?”

“I’m a person who is asking a question.”

“I don’t know!” Mae threw her arms up. Even fully outstretched, she only barely reached just above Bea’s head. It was kind of adorable. “I just do whatever comes to mind. My… I mean…” She balled both hands into fists and brought them together in a nervous tic. “I kind of. Have a therapist? Or I had one. And he, like, recommended that I make a journal? This was years ago! Like… high school. Yeah. Anyway, I tried to keep a journal but it was so annoying to write everything down. So I drew pictures instead. And I guess that worked out better? And. God. I don’t even want to get into how I wound up doing…”

“This?” Bea gestured at Mae’s studio facade. It took Mae a moment, her eyes widening, before she realized she had allowed Bea to lead her here. She scrunched her face up and shot Bea a glare. Bea, in turn, looked down, quite smug.

Something in Mae deflated, and she slumped over. “I wasn’t… I’m not even an art student, you know? I mean you can just look at this and be like, obviously.” She thumped one of her tapestries with the back of her hand. “It’s not freaking… fine art over here.”

“Mae, we literally just walked by a studio that made custom fishing flies strictly for display. Art is subjective.”

“I mean, those were awesome flies. One was like a comet!”

“They sure were, Mae. Now answer the question.”

“Jeez, you know, this is basically a ‘how do you get your ideas’ question and those are the lamest types of questions you can ask an artist.”

“You said you weren’t an artist.”

“I said I wasn’t an art _student_. There’s a difference.”

“Fair.” Bea focused her attention at Mae’s art.

The butcher paper hung from the walls of Mae’s studio were giant scrolls of pictographs. Bea had not given it much thought when she first saw them, but of the two that framed Mae’s door, the one to the left was completely filled out while the one on the right had some blank space yet. Slightly less space, now. In the bottom half of the paper, at the boundary between doodles and white emptiness, were new drawings that hadn’t been there before.

A cartoony little cat person holding up two L-shaped things, side-by-side with what looked like a crocodile and a fox person. The words “SCOURGE OF NEW LANDING” stretched over them in an arc. There were drawings of hot dogs and boats and — 

_Oh God, this is about last night_ , Bea thought.

“THOUGHT: MIGHT TRY TO SLEEP ON A BENCH” next to a picture of said bench with armrests removed. If Jackie saw this she’d probably think Mae’s awakening to the injustice of hostile architecture was cute.

So if the cat was Mae… Gregg was the fox-thing and Bea was the crocodile. This new knowledge served as a Rosetta Stone to unlock the hieroglyphics of the rest of the sheet. Mae’s cat was a recurring thing, seemingly stumbling through events on the page. Literally stumbling… or in one case, throwing up in the aftermath of a hangover? Rough stuff. Gregg was there too, now that Bea could recognize him. Along with various exhortations of “GREGG RULZ OK.” Bea didn’t expect her own representative animal to show up much, but she did see it. Next to a series of crudely drawn puppets. She looked angry with a cigarette dangling from her razor-sharp mouth and a caption underneath. “SOME NARC BUT ACTUALY MAYBE OKAY???”

“Hrm,” said Bea. She didn’t know if she was offended by the narc comment or the misspelling.

“Heh. Um. Yeah,” said Mae. She made a half-hearted effort to block the new sketches with her body. She’d need to be at least twice her height to accomplish anything.

Bea looked down at her until Mae started fidgeting.

“Well… look, the first time we met, you were very, uh, snappy,” said Mae. “So… alligator!”

“I was _not_ snappy.”

“You were snappy! You snapped!”

“Whatever. Not to tell you your business but if it were me, I wouldn’t go around drawing evidence of vandalism that I’ve committed.”

“I gotta follow my inspiration. Besides, you can’t use an artist’s art against them! That’s, like, double jeopardy or something.”

“Good God,” said Bea. At the top of the sheet of paper was a a single sketch that dominated, forcing other sketches into the margins and corners. A giant ribcage with tiny lightning bolt flourishes around it and two words in big, scratchy letters: BIG SKELETON.

“What’s that mean?” said Bea.

Mae seemed eager to answer that. “Oh, come with me and I’ll show you!”

~~~

It turned out the reason that Mae was so gung-ho to explain her art this one time was because the question took them far from her studio. She led Bea back into the main plaza, ground floor. Until they were in the middle with all the upper levels vaulting up and away from them like theater balconies.

Once there, Mae stamped her feet, one after the other, then spread her arms up and out as if to encompass the ceiling above her.

“Biiiig skeleton!” she said.

Bea looked up.

“See, if you kinda squint it kind of looks —”

“Yeah, I see it,” said Bea.

The ceiling sprawled overhead. The roof of the Glass Factory was this great, big support structure. Rafter beams ran down the length of it. Bracing beams crossed over and strengthened them. Together they formed a grid of metal trusses that held up a curved half-cylinder roof that looked imposing and fragile at the same time. The beams were unpainted, iron oxide red. Red and old. Which made them a stark contrast to the great big, white rib cage that ran smack through the center of the ceiling.

It was hard to see it any other way. At regular intervals, huge tapered beams of steel — these painted white — reached out from the sides of the building, running up the walls and spanning the space overhead to meet at the peak of the roof. There, a great beam, larger than any of the red ones, ran down the roof’s central ridge from one end of the building to the other. A criss-crossing network of gray steel cables formed a webwork that stretched from beam to beam with quivering tension.

“Looks cool, right?” said Mae. “It’s like someone decided, hey, let’s just make it so it feels like you’re inside this giant skeleton.”

“They’re support braces,” said Bea. “Back when this building was renovated it didn’t meet modern safety standards. Especially for a building meant to be an exhibit space. So they had to reinforce the whole structure.”

“And it looks cool,” Mae said firmly.

“And it looks cool,” Bea acquiesced. “Some of those braces go right through a studio. I had to call an ambulance for a painter who gave herself a concussion walking right into one in her own space.”

“You’d think they’d make it so that wouldn’t happen.”

“You’d think. Studios like that are pretty heavily discounted, though.”

“Huh. I should look into one.”

“Not as discounted as yours, Mae.”

“Oh.”

Mae put her hands in her pockets, eyes still up. She bounced on the balls of her feet. “I always liked how that looked,” she said, jutting her chin ceilingwards. “It’s like, there’s that old red steel and the new white steel. And they’re, like, sharing the same space. And it’s awkward. They don’t quite go together. You can see one part where they had to cut out a piece of the rib to make room for the original supports.”

Bea looked up again. They did look ill at ease. The straight lines and rusty look of the old supports and the sweeping white of the new ones, bending around each other.

“But they _do_ work, right?” said Mae. “Like you said. They hold this entire place up together. Make it all possible. Otherwise this would be just another crumbling, empty warehouse on the bad side of the river.”

“Hm,” said Bea.

“I think it’s neat.”

“I suppose.” Bea slouched, neck hunched down into her shoulders. “I suppose that’s an… interesting perspective,” she said, the effort necessary to concede that Mae had made an interesting observation was, perhaps, unfair of Bea.

Bea was starting to suspect she might have been unfair to Mae in a number of ways, and this possibility was starting to upset her. People shouldn’t suddenly become _interesting_ after you’ve decided they weren’t. It wasn’t fair.

“I’m tired,” said Bea. “I’m going to sit down again.” She turned and made back for the cafe. Mae trotted behind her.

As they approached, Bea noticed two things. It was still raining outside, that was one. Her boss was standing at the door to the cafe with a power drill in his hand. That was the other.

She approached him from the side, catching his eye before she came within speaking distance.

“You’re still here?” she said. She was beginning to suspect he lived here like some kind of lingering ghost.

“Could say the same about you,” he said. He tapped the drill bit against the door’s hinge. “Damn thing broke. Be a quick fix.”

“Do you own all those tools?” Mae said. “Or is it, like, art center property? If it’s art center property, does that mean I can use it?”

The Janitor looked down at Mae, eyes hidden under bushy eyebrows and unreadable. Then he looked at Bea. “So. Why ain’t you mosey’d out of here yet?”

“It’s raining and I didn’t bring an umbrella,” Bea said.

“That a fact,” said the Janitor. He turned back to the door and pressed the drill against a screw plate. “We got umbrellas in the lost and found locker. The big one in the office. Go ahead and take one. That’ll get you home.”

“Oh,” said Bea. She hadn’t thought of that.

“Oh, dang,” said Mae. “Lost and found! I always wonder about stuff you find in there! It’s like those shows where some gross dude buys a whole storage shed after the guy doesn’t pay rent and he opens it and keeps whatever’s inside.”

“It really isn’t, Mae,” said Bea. “Mostly it’s tourist stuff. Or cell phones. Credit cards.”

“Ooh.”

“No. Mae. It’s employees only there. I should get back, then. Thanks.” She nodded at the Janitor.

“You keep an eye on that one,” he said. He nodded almost imperceptibly towards Mae.

Bea wasn’t sure how to interpret that. “Uh. Yeah.” She turned away and looked at Mae. “Shouldn’t you be leaving too? This place is closing in, like, ten minutes.”

Mae looked from side to side. “Uh. Yeah! Just gotta… lock up my studio and stuff.”

“It was already locked.”

“I mean lock it up after I make sure everything’s put away! Jeez.”

“Don’t worry about her,” said the Janitor. “I’ll make sure she’s squared away.”

The relief on Mae’s face prodded at Bea, but with the prospect of leaving on the horizon, she pushed her curiosity aside.

“Okay. Do you want me to bring you an umbrella?” said Bea.

“Naw, I’m good. I like rain! I like feeling it. It’s like, nature’s touching me. All up in my face.”

“Okay. Don’t get sick and die, I guess,” said Bea.

“Aw. Thanks.”

“Hm. Well. Bye.” Bea stepped past Mae and walked away.

“Bye!” Mae called out. “Don’t forget the whole thing with the dudes! Tomorrow!”

Bea signaled back with an upraised hand as she left. Sure she worked a full day’s shift and a good chunk of it involved assembling and stocking an entire studio, but _hell_ she was tired. Was it the socializing? It was probably the socializing. It took a toll. She’d have to cut back on this kind of thing. It was like she was exercising muscles she never used and it sucked and was bad.

When she came back from the office with a great big umbrella, Mae was already gone. The Janitor was still there and he was still drilling at that door. What exactly he was trying to accomplish, Bea couldn’t fathom. Let there be mystery still in this world. No matter how mundane. She just wanted to get back to that couch in Jackie’s front room and close her eyes.

Also shower.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [tumblr](https://eldritchgarboandcosmicmalloy.tumblr.com)
> 
> "conan! what is best in life?"
> 
> "to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and write stories where emotionally truncated women grow to value one another"


	8. Strike a Pose and Spare Me

“I just don’t think it’s cool to be friends with your doctor,” Jackie said.

Bea leaned her elbows against the counter top as she settled into her seat across from Jackie. “She asked you to partner up for a bike ride, not share intimate secrets.”

“Sure, but that’s part of the problem. She already knows my intimate secrets. Like, any person who knows what my actual skull looks like should keep their relationship with me strictly professional. It’s a boundaries thing. Every time I visit her all I can think is ‘she knows way more about my skeleton than I do.’ It’s a wild thing to think.”

“Where is the boundary though?” said Bea. “Like, if I know your blood pressure am I still allowed to be your friend?”

It was morning and though Bea didn’t have work she woke up at the usual time, fearful of falling out of the habit. She had whipped up two fried egg sandwiches while Jackie was preparing for her job. Then the two sat at the kitchen counter to eat.

“If you start keeping a folder with my medical history, then I’d say we have to sit down and have a talk,” said Jackie.

“I’ll keep that in mind.” Bea took a napkin and wiped at errant crumbs on the counter top. They had never made a formal arrangement as far as household responsibilities went, but Bea had been cooking for her Dad for over five years now and it wasn’t a big transition to keep doing so here. Her new evening hours didn’t change the dynamic much as she had already perfected the science of having enough leftovers in the fridge to coast for a few days. A holdover from when she had to handle the cooking, the store’s bank balance, and inventory, all while her father sat in a comatose state in front of the television.

Jackie, who had never gotten out of the habit of a college student hunter-gatherer who scrounged delis and convenience stores for meals, was thrilled once Bea had convinced her she wasn’t doing this out of some sense of obligation.

It took Bea some time to convince herself of the same thing.

So it was great that things were so great now, and definitely not stressful or making her prone to panic migraines or anything like that.

“Bea!”

Bea jumped, nearly tottering back in her stool. She had curled the hand holding the napkin into a fist that was clutching it and rubbing it hard enough into the counter to tear.

Jackie dipped her head down to catch Bea’s eyes. “You okay there? You just about scrubbed the lacquer right off the counter, girl.”

“Sorry. I’m good.”

“What’s on your mind?”

“Nothing. Just. Generalized stress. You know.”

“I know. Excited about your get-together?”

The previous night, in a moment that Bea had come to regret, she had told Jackie that she was going out with Angus, Gregg and Mae. With the same kind of giddy pride an elementary schooler had when showing a perfect score to their parents. She was just that pathetically excited at having acquired her own social event without needing Jackie to nudge her along.

“Nnnnng,” said Bea. Telling Jackie had the unintended consequence of keeping Bea honest. If she had never said anything, maybe she could have skipped out. The truth was she dreaded it the way a child dreaded a dentist visit.

“Not into it?”

“I don’t know,” said Bea. “I don’t know. Like. I don’t know _why_ I don’t know. I mean, I feel like I should just not do it but I can’t think of any reason why.”

“I get it. You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

“You totally want me to though. I can hear it in your voice.”

“I think this will be good for you but this isn’t about what I want. It’s normal to be nervous.”

“Is it? Nervous to just… goddamn talk to other people? Be around them?”

“Sure. I mean, I only have my own experience to draw on.”

“You get nervous? But you’re a complete social butterfly.”

Jackie shrugged. “I deal.”

“Any tips?”

“Go outside, get some fresh air. It’s easier to convince yourself to socialize if you’re already out the door.”

“Mm. Maybe I will. Please let’s not make a big deal about this. I want to feel like I can achieve a bare minimum of human contact without it being like a major global event.”

“Shutting up,” said Jackie.

There was a moment of silence, interrupted only by the soft crunch of toasted bread as they ate.

“So that one chick who knocked me over is going to be there, huh?” said Jackie.

“Oh my God.”

“I’m not talking about you, I’m just talking about her. That’s fair game.”

“Is it weird?”

“If I were going, it would be weird.”

“I feel so stupid.”

“You weren’t the one who landed on her ass in public,” said Jackie.

“I am so sorry about that.”

Jackie held up her hand. “Don’t worry about it. I have a rule. If you’re willing to call someone your friend, you’re willing to tackle someone who they want tackled.”

All the same, Bea put her hands to her face. “You’re a really good friend, Jackie,” she said, her voice muffled in her palms.

“Fuckin’ yeah I am.” Jackie jammed the rest of her sandwich in her face and washed it down with a final gulp from her glass. “I gotta go,” she said, spraying crumbs. “Have fun. For once.”

“Yes ma’am, aye aye,” said Bea, snapping a halfhearted salute at Jackie’s middle finger that withdrew as the door shut behind her. Bea finished her breakfast in silence and sat.

She was not an anxious person. At least, she was reasonably sure she was not an anxious person. So this state of mind was something she should probably unpack. Find out what was going on that made her dread going out.

A few more minutes ticked by where nothing moved save the shadows of tree branches swaying outside the window.

Bea placed her hands palm-down and flat on the counter top. Then, bracing as if she were about to take a leap over a glacial ravine, she stood up, stacked the dishes together and walked to the kitchen sink. She rinsed them off and left them on the rack to dry and the white noise of water rushing through the faucet grounded her. She dried off her hands, shut off the water, and then went to the living room. There she sat on the couch, back straight and hands clasped on her lap. She let out a breath she had been holding for some time and tilted her head back, letting it rest on the sofa so she was staring up at the ceiling.

In an ideal world, Bea could pick apart her thoughts and get to the bottom of what was bothering her. Untangle it like a string of Longest Night lights that had been languishing in the attic for the better part of a year. Regard the mess of her thoughts in some metaphilosophical, detached way. Grab one end of the tangle and weave it in and out of the knots and loops, smoothing out the turmoil until it was one immaculate line of rational thoughts.

More and more, Bea was beginning to suspect that human brains didn’t work that way. The mind wasn’t a tangle of thoughts. It was a storm of them. From a distance it’s easy to see the structure of a storm. To see its shape, the megastructure of a wall cloud, the dark, heavy cumulonimbus thunderheads, the lines of nimbostratus layering atop each other. The sweep of a storm could be observed and understood from afar.

But get in close and the eddies of warm and cold air curling into one another and the lightning discharges and the micro vortexes render any attempt to find sense into farce. Order is lost, chaos reigns in the rain. That was what Bea’s head felt like. The moment she felt she could get a grip on her thoughts they would become as insubstantial as the air, yet they howled and hammered at her with hurricane force.

Maybe she should just go outside. It was actually clear, the rain from the previous night having spent itself. A change of clothes and a change of scenery.

Bea had a closet now. Formerly, it was a shoe closet and it was immediately to one side of the apartment entrance. It was small and one time, while she was changing, Jackie entered the apartment and bashed the door right into Bea’s back sending her tumbling into the closet. But for the most part it suited her needs. The clothing she had brought with her were few enough to hang it all inside.

It wasn’t so long ago that she had unfolded her clothes from her suitcase. They all had that smell to them. That smell that came from being jammed into a mildewy old case. Impossible for her to describe, save that it was the smell of something lost, displaced and forlorn and aching. The smell was washed away, her suitcase stowed along with… a few other things she had taken from the apartment she had shared with her father. But that smell had a direct line to her memory. At work it kept in the background but it grew stronger when she was alone.

New air, she resolved with a shake of her head. Fill her lungs with new air that could chase the scent away. She opened the closet and went through her clothes.

After giving her pockets one final check Bea came out, locking the apartment door behind her. the air was bracing and cool. The sun, still low this early in the day, cast sharp-angled shadows cut from the buildings that lined the road. The omnipresent hum of traffic was a steady drone that bounced off brick walls. The squeal of brakes, the occasional human voice, a dog in the distance. The paper-dry sound of a dry leaf skittering across the sidewalk. Bea closed her eyes and breathed in deep. Fresh air cut with diesel and moss. Sometimes, the world could be pretty nice.

The previous night’s rain left the streets and sidewalks dark with moisture and a heavy dampness lingered in the air. It reminded Bea of home, the wet air pooling between the buildings here much as they collected in the ridges of the low, rolling mountains, gathering up morning mist and funneling it into a thick blanket. It tapped into some entrenched emotion ingrained into Bea and she unconsciously drew herself up and breathed in deep. Closing her eyes, she walked as if she were in some sleepy deep mountain town and not an urban-ass environment in the early morning with garbage trucks and morning rush hour and a sidewalk with potholes. She nearly turned an ankle on one and that was enough to convince her of the wisdom of watching where you were walking.

Bea had gone some blocks before realizing that she had been following her usual route to work. It had just happened, like an autopilot for her body. She frowned, a tight, sour twist of her lips, then in a pique she turned left at the next intersection.

She could name every street and recognize every corner on her way to work, but the moment she deviated from that well-worn path her knowledge of Old Harbor dropped sharply. The same applied back home. She had a short list of routes to important places that were ingrained in her head. She could follow them with her eyes closed. But the roads that ran perpendicular to that path were as unknown to her as countries on the opposite side of the world. A person could live in a place their entire life and never truly know it; terra incognito just on the other side of a high fence.

Did she really have to come this far to start a new life? She could have gone two blocks down from her father’s apartment, changed the roads she traveled on, the destinations she went to, and could have carved out an entirely new existence just from that. One that ran parallel to her old one, never touching but still within sight. The proximity of painful memories probably would have driven her away all the same and she didn’t have a friend with a couch to crash on back home, but it still made her wonder.

Was she even starting a new life in Old Harbor? The more time that separated her from the moment she climbed on a bus, the more she questioned what she was trying to accomplish. All she had felt in that moment was a need to get away. She remembered clambering down onto the ground at Old Harbor’s bus station, legs all rubbery from having sat in one place so long, nerves shot because one of the other passengers had refused to _take a fucking hint_ and stop chatting her up like this was a single’s bar and not a tin can of misery on wheels. Jackie had been waiting. One hand was a fist she used to ward off the passenger. The other held a bottle of water that Bea didn’t even know she needed. That was how wrung out she was.

On the whole, she had been pretty damned lucky. Luck had gotten her out of town and onto a couch, though, so it was a mixed bag. Now that she was here there had to be another step to take. Being a janitor and having no home was not any kind of endgame in Bea’s book. She remembered having ambition once, aspirations for some big bright dream. An idea of herself that she wanted and worked to reach towards. Yeah, freshman year in high school was pretty cool.

That version of her was out of reach now and Bea felt bereft of drive. She didn’t know where to drive _to_. She literally had a driver’s license. It was in her suitcase. She had no car though; the truck was her dad’s and mostly used for work. When her thoughts went to the future — her future — she couldn’t see anything. As if she had come up against a wall with no way around or over it. Just her job and the couch. It made her feel tired and hollow and it was all enough to make her — Bea cursed again, brought out of her head as she nearly took a trip over another pothole. This place was a goddamn _wreck_.

She looked around as if she had just woken from a trance. She was surrounded by brick buildings, much the same as the type around Jackie’s place. These were a nicer sort of brick though. There was hardly any moss on them at all. Still it was old, building facades blackened by the years upon years of traffic exhaust. Trees planted at intervals gave the sidewalk a pleasant shade and the way the branches swayed in the wind made Bea feel as if she were being caressed by the breeze. 

The building immediately next to her took up the half the block. Imposing arches of dark brick contrasted with weathered concrete trim. The four corners of the building were capped by squat towers with peaked cupolas. At eye level were battered and dented light boxes on the walls and in them were posters. Once glossy, they were now sun-faded and curling at the edges.

Each light box was embossed with a logo in peeling gold foil: Invenerus Theatre.

There was a brief period, somewhere around middle school, where Bea had considered herself a theater buff. She imagined most people did around that time. Maybe it was a puberty thing. Being able to play different roles, being a different person felt attractive when people started changing. Bea had never acted though. Getting on stage was a big ask. But she liked the production side. The directing and such. Being behind the scenes felt like being a part of a secret world that ended as abruptly as it began, genesis with a flick of the stage lights and apocalypse with every curtain call.

Opposite of the theater was a park. Gloomy oaks with swaying branches that draped themselves over old benches. A squirrel climbed out of a garbage can and the sound of its claws skittering over the metal carried across the street. Bea watched as it leapt to a neighboring tree and clambered up the trunk.

There was nothing but concrete and brick in every direction, Bea thought. Did the squirrel ever go beyond the boundaries of the park? Was this patch of green all it knew? Did it ever dream of anything more? What did it even think of its life?

Bea waited. For an answer or a sign or even a hawk to swoop down and catch the squirrel in its talons. That’d be something. Instead, the animal twitched its tail, looked briefly at her with one beady doll-dead eye and then scurried away. The world did not stop.

Bea turned and walked away.

~~~

“Do I look okay?” said Angus. He picked at the sleeve of his sweater.

“Yes,” said Bea. “You look fine, Angus.”

“You’re not even looking!”

Bea raised her eyes from her phone. After her complete lack of revelation, she had returned to spend a couple hours aimlessly wandering the Glass Factory. Because of course she would end up killing time there. She managed to keep occupied by browsing the displays she hadn’t covered with Mae the previous night. Soon after she found herself in front of Angus’ studio, where she saw him pacing.

“I wore a new sweater for this,” he said. “Now it’s itching. Do you have deodorant? I think I need deodorant.” He began pacing again.

“Angus? Hey. Angus?” Bea tilted her head, catching his eyes and willing him to a standstill.

“Yeah?”

“You’re fine. Okay? You look good, you don’t stink and I’m sure this will go fine. Okay? You have to say it now.”

“I don’t stink and this will go fine,” he recited.

“See?”

“Okay, yeah. Okay.”

“Honestly, Angus. He’s a petty crook who ties a boat to sticks for a living. The bar can’t be that high.”

Angus stood up straight and gave Bea a stern look. “Really that’s not a very nice thing to say, Bea.”

She looked him in the eye and chewed the inside of her cheek. “Okay. You’re right. I’m sorry.”

Angus gave her a curt nod. An awkward silence settled between them that Bea desperately wanted to clear away.

“Is that the only hat you have?” she said.

Reflexively, Angus’ hand went up to the brim of his fedora. “Uh. Yeah. What? Is it… is there dirt on it? Does it smell? I’m surrounded by vape people all day. It smells, doesn’t it?”

“Vape people? What do they call themselves? Are they vapers? Vape enthusiasts?”

“The hat, Bea. The hat. Is there something wrong with it?”

“No. I was just wondering if you had more than one.”

“Why would you wonder this now what are you doing to me.”

“Angus, I think it would be a good idea to get outside the studio. You need fresh air.”

“That means I smell, right?”

“Angus, I swear to God if we don’t get outside you are probably going to explode and I don’t want to be responsible for cleaning that up.”

With a sigh and a nod, Angus acquiesced. “It’s nearly time anyway,” he said.

The plan had been for Bea to find Angus and Mae to find Gregg and to put them at a table together. Which all felt very weird to Bea. They had each other’s contact info. Instead of being sensible and sane, Bea was now handing Angus off like she was the father of the bride. It was very stupid and mostly a product of Mae’s inability to plan.

“It’s not entirely her fault,” said Angus as they walked down the spiral stairs. “Nobody else was really planning this out.”

From the corner of her eye, Bea spotted the Janitor ambling across the ground floor. She studiously ignored him. “How exactly did you figure this whole date thing was going to play out, then?”

Angus made vague arm motions. “I don’t know! I just… we meet? And… talk? And hope it works out?”

“Like nobody mentioned time or place or anything that has to do with the physical, like, logistics?”

“Mae was kind of relaying our texts to each other and some stuff probably got lost in the shuffle.”

Bea rolled her eyes. “God. I’m glad I wasn’t around for all this, just hearing it makes me want to kick a child through a window. Where are we all meeting?”

“The, uh, cafe downstairs.”

Just once, Bea would have appreciated a reason to get away from this place, but it didn’t seem like that was in the cards. “Cool,” she said flatly.

“I like their crumb cakes. I wonder if I could get the recipe.”

“It’s shipped frozen from a factory in upstate New York,” Bea said, who had offloaded a truckload of the cafe’s baked goods more than once. “The same cake is sold in that new grocery store up a few blocks. The one that’s like a third of the size of a regular store and three times the price.”

“Ah,” said Angus.

They didn’t say anything else for a while.

“Sorry,” said Bea.

“About what?”

“I know I’m a killjoy, is all. It’s cool if you want to make a crumb cake.”

Angus chuckled. “Don’t worry about it. I’m just babbling. Nervous. You know how dates are.”

“Never been on one.”

“Really? Never?”

“Nope,” said Bea, popping the “p”. “Never got around to it. Too busy with other stuff.” She watched Angus’ expression as he was just about to ask the inevitable question and then got to it before he did. “There was a guy I knew, uh, summer of 11th grade. Math camp. But that didn’t last long. You know how math camp is.”

“Never been.”

“Well, there you go. The human experience is a many varied thing and we can’t walk down every possible path it lays out for us.”

“Yeah. Thanks for sharing,” said Angus and to Bea’s mild annoyance and consternation he sounded rather sincere about it. “You never really talk about yourself,” he continued.

Bea blinked rapidly, taken aback. “Okay,” she said finally. “Well. I’m just saying. If you’re looking for relationship or dating advice or whatever I’m like, the objectively worst choice.”

“Specifics not withstanding, I think you can give out good advice simply because you’re very level-headed.”

“Yeah?” Bea tilted her head. “Yeah. I suppose I am.”

“Hey, you’re even complimenting yourself now.”

“I mean,” Bea went on, “I’m in a constant state of wanting to beat down exactly twelve people with a piece of iron rebar. But I don’t. Because I’m level-headed. That’s what it means to be level-headed. To have a heap of hot garbage inside of you that you hold back. That’s what level-headed people do, because I categorically refuse to believe that anyone on this planet actually has their shit together. It has to be a front.”

“Well,” Angus said. He looked straight ahead as they walked. “Well. Okay.”

They reached the bottom of the steps before Bea broke the silence. “Should I apologize for being a kill-joy again?”

“No, no, we’re. That’s. We’ve navigated that particular hazard. Let’s just go meet the others.”

“Neat,” said Bea. She stuffed her hands in her pockets and walked in a long-legged gait to keep up with Angus as he headed to the cafe.

Mae and Gregg were seated at the exact same table they had used the previous night. Mae was batting another hot chocolate between her hands and Gregg held a Fiascola up to his mouth. His eyes wandered as he sipped and happened upon Angus approaching with Bea in tow. Gregg’s eyes widened and he spluttered, jerking the can from his lips and spitting-coughing soda on the weathered black leather jacket he was wearing.

“Ha ha!” said Mae, not noticing their approach. “Dude, you —”

“Shhhh sh sh shhh sh!” said Gregg. He grabbed a napkin and dabbed at his jacket and stood up, each motion succeeding in knocking over: his can, the chair he was sitting in and very nearly the table itself, which Mae held on to. “Hi!” he said, extending his hand and then, evidently deciding that looked uncool, very conspicuously bringing it up to his hair as if he were actually attempting to smooth it down.

“Hey,” said Angus, and his voice sounded a note higher. He cleared his throat and when he spoke next it was unnaturally low. “I mean, hey. How’s it going.”

Between the two of them, Bea wondered if it were possible for her to cringe hard enough that she could collapse into a singularity.

The two sat at the table and when Bea looked at Mae to give her a perfunctory greeting Mae was raising her eyebrow and gesturing with her head to the boys in a “get a load of these two” kind of way. Bea’s mouth twitched up in a quick smile.

“Hey,” said Gregg. “Hi. I’m. Gregg. You knew that. But we never, like, introduced ourselves. People do that. Right?”

“I’m Angus.” Angus put his hand out to shake when Gregg’s own hand twitched forward. After a few moments of comically miscommunicated hand gestures, they managed to get it down.

“Dude, this should be our secret handshake,” said Gregg.

“Ha ha ha,” said Angus.

Bea looked at Mae and attempted to psychically scream into her head.

Mae didn’t seem to notice. Instead she was watching Gregg, whose eyes were darting between her and Angus. “Aw, you two,” she said. “Are you hungry?”

Gregg and Angus traded glances and half-shrugs. “I… could eat,” ventured Angus. Gregg backed him up by nodding his head.

“They don’t exactly serve lunch fare here,” said Bea. “Unless you’re into overpriced small sandwiches with a sliver of freeze dried chicken and a smear of pesto.”

“They do serve a pretty good bagel here, though,” said Angus.

Bea was about to concede this was correct when another janitor — not The Janitor, but a co-worker she had occasionally crossed paths with — walked by pushing a cleaning cart. Bea sunk into her chair and hoped she wouldn’t be noticed.

By casting her eyes forward and down, Bea briefly saw Mae staring at her with a confused expression. Of course, none of these people had to worry about being recognized by co-workers at what was meant to be a social engagement. Because Bea’s was the only life that revolved around this damned place.

“Hey…” Mae said. “What if we went somewhere else?”

Bea looked up.

“I’m down,” said Gregg. “Any suggestions?”

Mae scrunched her face up in thought, then her expression lit up. “Let’s go bowling!”

The others stared.

“Come on,” said Mae. “When was the last time any of you went bowling?”

“Kind of stopped around the same time I stopped going to middle school pizza parties,” said Bea.

“Yeah exactly, way too long. It’ll be fun and they’ll have burgers! Nothing better than bowling alley burgers!”

It was… not an idea that would occur to Bea ever. It was also not a terrible idea to have. She looked at Angus, who looked at Gregg, who looked at Mae.

“Yeah, dude! Sounds good.”

And that was that.

~~~

Angus and Gregg together didn’t really work in Bea’s head. She largely kept it to herself, once it was clear that Angus had little patience for the little cutting comments she made regarding Gregg. And she had to concede she was on the verge of acting petty towards him. Even though he _did_ steal private property and nearly jeopardized her job and even indirectly caused some measure of personal injury to her person. Angus obviously wanted this whole date thing to go on his terms and Bea decided to leave it at that.

And even though the two didn’t seem right together in her mind, she seemed to be in the minority with that opinion because they were actually hitting it off. Once the initial awkwardness evaporated, Gregg and Angus were quite chatty with each other. The two fell behind while Mae led the way. Bea kept up with Mae if only so as not to feel completely left out.

“Nice day,” she said. “I can’t believe I said that,” she added after a pause. 

“What?” said Mae.

“Nothing. Just talking about the goddamn weather. Forever cementing my status as the God Queen of Conversation, may cherubs lay rose petals at my feet as I go up to people to state the Glaringly Fucking Obvious.”

“It’s all good,” said Mae. “I think this is going super well!”

“Mm. Yes. I think it might be.”

“This is like, the first time I did something that didn’t blow up in my face. I’m kinda impressed.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“Oh, no, wait, there was that time I was breeding rats. But that was mainly just me throwing food into a rat’s nest in an abandoned building. I don’t know if that’s the same level of accomplishment I’ve got going on here.”

“It’s at least a comparison I’d spare the boys,” said Bea.

“Hm. Yeah. How about you?”

“How about me?”

“I mean, this is all cool? With you?”

“My opinion doesn’t really enter into the equation.”

“Aw, c’mon. I mean, it’s their date but we’re still here.”

“There are four of us and I still feel like the fifth wheel. That’s _my_ accomplishment for the day.”

Mae pouted. It was kind of adorable. They didn’t say much else after, with her leading the way and Bea letting the gears turn idly in her head while Angus and Gregg chatted behind them. They were walking away from the river, deeper inland. Their surroundings were still vintage Old Harbor; rectangular brick buildings with few adornments and the occasional arch or column. Commuters and busses and the occasional double-decker tourist conveyance — sparsely populated with sour-faced gawkers who had nothing better to do on a weekday — occupied the street.

About a mile and change out from the river the buildings abruptly flattened out and the parking lots sprawled. In front of them the highway cut through Old Harbor. Here the strip malls gnawed at the edges of the city and beyond the highway the suburban blight crawled over the landscape; roads like fractal tentacles repeating endless patterns of winding, samey houses. The ambient noise of traffic turned into a roar and the stink of exhaust fumes hung heavy, stinging with every inhalation.

“I live near here!” Angus said over the highway din. “It kind of sucks, but the rent is almost affordable.”

Down the way, set back from the street at the end of a cracked, sun-baked and mostly empty parking lot was a low boxy building. An electric sign that read “Harbor Lanes” over a set of dingy sliding doors.

“Sometimes I’d look across the street and wonder who bowls at 2 in the afternoon on a weekday. I guess I know the answer now,” said Angus.

“Cool people,” said Mae.

“People, at least,” said Bea.

The sliding door made an unholy squealing racket when they stepped through. Bea was hit with the sounds of nostalgia. The intermittent thunder roll and crash of bowling balls gliding across lanes and into pins. The vintage rock playing over poor quality speakers. Music her Mom liked to put on her record player. Something worth locking up in a mental vault and studiously not thinking about.

“Oh man, we’re gonna wear bowling shoes. I haven’t worn bowling shoes since the time I got banned from that one place,” said Gregg.

“That was last month, dude,” said Mae.

“Way too long.”

“You can, uh, buy bowling shoes. I think,” Angus said.

“Can you imagine having your own pair of bowling shoes and you just wear them around the house?” said Gregg. “That’d be weird.”

“Good weird?” said Angus.

“Only if they’re like the rental shoes. All dingy and worn.”

“We should make teams,” Mae said. “Girls versus guys.”

“Whichever team loses pays for food!” Gregg said.

Bea noted Angus giving her a surreptitious look. She shrugged and nodded. She had budgeted a little extra spending money for this day. 

They rented their equipment and picked out a lane. It had been a long time since Bea had done this. Back when she was a kid she had this fear that one of her fingers could get jammed in a ball. The mental image of her thumb coming off at the joint when she sent a ball rolling came back to her with the immediacy that childhood fears always seemed to have. Funny, the kind of thoughts that stick with a person long after they should have outgrown them. Bea could barely recall her friends from elementary school but she could still remember all the little fears.

She didn’t care all that much for her score; Bea spent most of the time focusing on her movements. That was always a suggestion the chaperons called out to kids. As if that meant anything when you were nine and still barely aware of where your limbs were. Add to that a heavy weight dangling freely from one arm and they may as well speak in tongues. Older now, Bea could feel the control in her arm and simply enjoyed the act of moving. This turned out to be an effective approach, as she zen-stated herself into a few spares and even a strike by the time they came to the final frame.

In the end, Bea and Mae ate courtesy of Gregg and Angus. Which was cool because it meant Bea could splurge on groceries later.

“Dude! I demand a rematch!” said Gregg. “My honor depends on it.”

“I don’t think I can afford another defeat,” said Angus.

Gregg cast one arm over his eyes and fell back into his chair. It swiveled and groaned in protest. “Slain by my comrade! Woe unto me.”

“You want ketchup? It must be new, it doesn’t even have the crusty old ketchup on it.” Mae said.

“Oh, nice.” Gregg recovered and grabbed the bottle from her.

The fries were pale, soggy and oversalted. The hamburgers were passable. In Bea’s estimation there were worst things she could put into her stomach, but it was not a long list.

Mae, on the other hand, seemed like she was eating manna from heaven. She was smiling with her entire face. Eyes, cheeks, mouth.

“This was fun. We should, like, make this a thing.” She said.

Bea made a noncommittal noise. Gregg and Angus were too busy giving moon-eyes to each other. It was a pain to admit, but Bea had to concede that they made a cute couple. It took Mae elbowing her in the shoulder and pointing at their food for Bea to realize that they were sharing fries.

If Bea was feeling like a fifth wheel before, she was pushing well into 12th wheel at this point and receding further into the distant horizon. She swiped a napkin across her mouth and moved to get up.

“I’m gonna go out for a smoke,” she said.

Mae looked at her, then looked at the boys. She opened her mouth as if to say something but Bea had already left the table.

Outside, the day was setting to dwindle away. Not yet twilight, but there was the definite golden pall of a sun eager to set. Bea found the meager smoker’s refuge some distance away from the door: a filthy standing ashtray and a sun-bleached bench.

Across the street was a shopping center consisting of a single anchor supermarket and a number of generic storefronts. A pylon sign listing all the stores stood at the side of the road and Bea couldn’t help but notice there were more blank spaces on the sign than not. One of the blanks was covered over by an orange vinyl banner that read HALLOWEEN COSTUMES in block black letters. It flapped in the breeze of passing highway traffic.

By the end of the month, that store will be another empty space; like a gap in an old beggar’s smile. And the other stores will likely follow it. Bea thought back and she couldn’t think of a single example of a shopping center that ever bounced back once stores started closing. They only ever spiraled further into decrepitude. She wondered how the people who leased the stores felt, looking at the empty spaces and likely knowing that they’d soon follow. Chained in place by a lease they were less and less able to pay. And this thought led her to remember the bills she would spread out on the kitchen table of her father’s apartment. How she’d stare at them with a sick twist in her gut while her father grumbled at the television during a Smelters game.

She clenched her cigarette between her fingers hard enough to feel the filter collapse. She sighed and flicked the thing away.

“Aw dang, we should check out the Halloween store.” Mae’s voice broke interrupted Bea’s death spiral of thought. Mae had come up unnoticed and approached the bench.

“Pass,” said Bea.

“When was the last time you dressed up for Halloween?” said Mae.

“Long time ago. Shouldn’t you be in with the guys?”

“Like they’re not doing their best to make it awkward as possible,” said Mae. “If they get any closer they’d need to, like, climb onto each other’s lap. I love Gregg he’s my true bone deep ride or die blood bro, but I don’t need to see that with my own eyes.”

“Okay,” said Bea.

“What about you?”

“Uh. I distinctly remember saying I wanted a smoke?”

“That was, like, 15 minutes ago. And you’re not smoking.”

It hadn’t felt that long. Then again Bea had been really engrossed in imagining the misery of strip mall leasees. Really committed to that scenario.

“Same reason,” she said after a moment.

“Ha, yeah,” said Mae.

Bea was pretty content to let the awkward silence settle in and really make itself at home. It was better than mentally flopping around for a topic, which Mae was visibly doing. She cast her eyes about for something to talk about, opening her mouth and then closing it as she thought better. It was entertainment of its own kind and Bea was the sole audience. She settle into the bench, which sent a twinge down her back that made her wince.

“You okay?” Mae said.

“Fine,” said Bea. “Just… back kind of aches from work. Going bowling didn’t do it any favors.”

“Oh,” said Mae. Then silence reigned once again. 

Bea put her hands in her lap and breathed in that good exhaust-choked air.

“This isn’t a great place to, like, live I think,” said Mae.

“Hm. No,” said Bea. “But it’s cheap.”

“Kind of sucks that all the cheap places to live are the worst. Like, as if life doesn’t suck enough when you’re poor, but you also have to live here, where it’s literally never quiet, the air is poison and you see more cars than people.”

“That’s why it’s cheap,” Bea said with labored patience.

“I mean yeah, but this shouldn’t be the only kind of place where you can live. Like, there should be more… like… you should be allowed to have a good life even if you don’t have all the money, you know?”

“Mm.”

“Do you live out here?”

“… I share an apartment with a friend.”

“Oh,” said Mae even though Bea had not answered the question.

It was a good thing that Jackie wasn’t here, Bea decided. She would have recognized and called out Bea’s stubborn refusal to be social. It was an impulse that Bea did not entirely understand herself. At some point in her life she had learned to never give an inch for fear of forfeiting a mile. Jackie would call it self-sabotage. Bea didn’t know what to call it. It was simply there, being a part of her. Like how someone wearing clothes stops noticing the fabric rubbing against their skin.

And when they consciously _start_ noticing, it’s all they think about and so to was it with Bea. She closed her eyes and exhaled. “I live —”

“By Riverbend,” said Mae. “I remember. I mean. I forgot. But I just remembered. I forget things pretty much all the time.”

“Right.”

Mae beamed for reasons Bea could not fathom. That probably meant she was doing something right. She usually wasn’t this bad at socializing but Mae was like a mystery box with buttons and levers that functioned at random.

“So. Thanks for inviting me,” Bea said.

“Yeah! I mean, we literally made plans to do this,” said Mae.

“In a haphazard kind of way. I actually didn’t expect you to follow through.”

“Wow.”

“Don’t take it personally, I don’t expect most people to follow through with plans they make. It’s just, normally on my day off I’d be laying on the carpet, losing my mind on the internet.”

“The internet is okay,” said Mae, “but it’s like the prime infection vector for brain rot disease.”

Bea couldn’t help the giggle-snore that escaped her mouth but once it did get out she clamped her lips shut until she was sure she was back in control. “Yeah,” she said eventually. “Definitely.”

Mae gestured with her head back to the entrance. “We should check on the guys. Make sure they’re not making out in the bathroom or anything.”

“Gross.”

“You didn’t see them after you left! Though I am glad this is working out. Gregg was super nervous.”

“Really? He doesn’t seem the type.” Bea stood to walk.

Mae followed and gave Bea a flat look. “How well do you know Gregg?”

Bea had to concede that she did not, in fact, know him much at all. She was about to say as much, but then the sliding doors opened ahead of them, and Angus came out and Gregg quickly after and Bea bumped into him, knowing him entirely more than she had intended.

“Ow,” she said.

Gregg on the other hand, being shorter, reeled from the impact. Angus caught him and steadied him and _goddamn_ , thought Bea. This was all getting to be a little much.

“Sorry,” she said.

“It’s cool,” Gregg said after a moment where he seemed to forget where he was. Angus adjusted Gregg’s leather jacked on his shoulders. “It’s. Um. Super cool.”

“Gregg and I were talking about some old video games,” said Angus. “I have some at my place that I wanted to show him.”

“I’m into that retro shit,” Gregg said. Meanwhile, above him Angus was shooting Bea a very, very meaningful look.

Bea returned with a sidelong look, but when Angus started mouthing _please_ she elected to go easy on him. “Sounds fun. I think I’ll pass. Got shit to do. It was fun though.”

“Yes, absolutely it was very fun,” Angus said far too eagerly.

 _You are hilarious_ Bea mouthed at him.

 _Shut up_ Angus replied.

“Oh man, I love old games,” said Mae. “Do you have any of the — what were the skateboard games? Anyway yeah, let’s — Ow! What the hell Gregg!”

“Dude…”

“You’re being weird, dude.”

“Oh my God, Mae,” said Gregg.

“We’re going, Mae,” said Bea.

“What? But!”

“We. Are. Going.”

Bea pointedly walked past the other three. She wasn’t going to drag Mae physically, she wasn’t about to reduce herself to that. Surely Mae was mature enough to —

“Ohhhhhhh!” Bea heard from behind. “You two are gonna, like, bone!”

It was by a stroke of luck that Bea had reached the end of the building because then she could hurl herself around the corner and press herself into the wall where she laughed until she was near tears.

~~~

“I didn’t know!” said Mae.

“Obviously,” said Bea, still grinning.

“They could have just said so! I mean, we’re all adults.”

“Some of us more adult than others, I think.”

“Oh whatever.”

There was an offramp from the highway that fed into the street the bowling alley was on, and that street formed Canal Way, which was the main artery into Old Harbor: a broad four-lane avenue shaded over by trees. It ran for a mile, then it hit the river and the docks where the Glass Factory dominated. From there Canal Way bent south where it ran several miles more through Old Harbor, parallel to the river. Jackie’s apartment on Riverbend was a few streets off, Miller’s where they had karaoke was further still. Eventually Canal Way fed into another highway that vaulted over the river as bridge connecting to Bright Harbor. 

By the time it exited Old Harbor through the south, Canal Way was a cracked, pothole-ridden mess. Like a river downstream of pollution. But up here it was a pleasant and well-maintained thoroughfare that rolled under a canopy of leaves. Bea and Mae walked side by side towards the river. Evening rush hour crowded Canal Way and the air was punctuated by the sound of car horns and growling brakes.

“But that was like, so fast!” said Mae. “I mean, props to my dude but damn, Angus works fast. You wouldn’t know it from looking at him.”

“True. I think he doesn’t like to let opportunities pass by.”

“Probably a good attitude to have just generally,” said Mae.

“Probably.”

“Do you know which way you’re going?”

“Uh. Yeah?” said Bea. “The Glass Factory. We are on the main road.”

“Oh.”

“Isn’t it your _job_ to go around the city delivering stuff?”

Mae shrugged. “I’m not on the job right now. Kind of turn off my sense of direction then.”

“Wish I could do the same with my job,” said Bea. She had already identified several different methods and the equipment needed to clean up the dried gum that dotted the sidewalk.

“Plus all these buildings are the same.” Mae waved her hand from one side of the road to the other. “If it wasn’t for my phone literally telling me directions I’d get lost like way more than I currently do. Why do they all look so boring?”

“It’s Federal architecture,” Bea said automatically, the urge to share trivia she had picked up and never used was far too much to resist.

“God. There’s a name for boring ass buildings?”

“It’s an interpretation of Roman architecture using 19th-century building materials. With a little American Puritanism mixed in. See the flat brick facades with the arches? That’s Federal. And the cement friezes on the corner.”

“Freezers?”

“Friezes. The white decorations. Ivy vines or whatever the hell they’re supposed to be.”

“Is the Glass Factory a Federalist or whatever building?”

“That’s modernist. Factories at the start of the 20th century were kind of like proto-modernist structures.”

“How the hell do you even know this crap?” Mae said. “How is this even a thing to know?”

“I read the tourist pamphlets at the reception kiosk when I get bored. They talk about stuff like this.”

“No wonder tourism sucks around here if the pamphlets are talking about this!” Mae said, throwing her arms skyward. “You think there’s a tourist out there who’s going to get all excited reading that?”

“What do tourists want, then?” Bea said. She rolled her eyes. “I’m sure Old Harbor’s city council will be absolutely floored by your observations.”

“They want to know cool things. Like, did a dude get murdered so hard in one of these boring-ass buildings that he turned into a ghost? If yes, then put that in there!”

“Oh, like ghost tours?”

Mae looked at Bea all agog. “That’s a thing?”

“Um. Yes. How have you not known about Old Harbor ghost tours?”

“I don’t know I don’t pay attention to tours! Sitting in an air-conditioned bus looking out tinted windows at people and places and then going back home and pretending you actually experienced anything you couldn’t have gotten by watching a TV show!”

“Okay well tourism is actually a pretty good chunk of Old Harbor’s economy so it is kind of a thing. Gregg works in tourism. The Glass Factory basically wouldn’t exist without tourism.”

“Whatever!”

“A stunning rebuttal, all my arguments have been dashed upon the rocks of your ironclad thesis.”

“Yeah, yeah. Moving on. Are the ghost tours cool?”

“I’ve never been,” said Bea. “Like I said, I just read the pamphlets.” She looked around the street, noting the sign at the upcoming intersection. “If you go down the right from here, there’s a house from colonial times where an entire family of nobles was chopped up by their indentured servants.”

“Cool, very cool.” Mae said, eyes wide and with every sign of being totally into that. 

“Uh. And a couple streets down is this graveyard that’s next to the oldest surviving church in the state. And there’s supposed to be a lady ghost who wanders around after midnight looking for her husband who was lost at sea.”

“Decent. Basically traditional to have a ghost story like that.”

“There’s a marketplace that used to have slave auctions and the building where it was held is supposed to be all kinds of gnarly with ghosts. I think the holding cells are still preserved.”

“Yeah, that’d do it. That’s prime haunts. Oh, dang, we should go on a ghost tour!”

“What?”

“Yeah! They sound pretty intense!”

“Uhhhh…” Bea hoped that she could fill in the time so that Mae’s brain could catch up to Mae’s mouth to inform it that it had just asked Bea out for what sounded suspiciously like a friend thing. Which Bea was… reasonably sure they were not. Mostly. Kind of. More or less.

“I mean, it’s probably like, a walking tour? Only way to do a ghost tour,” said Mae. “So not like right now. But some time!”

How do you even make friends? There wasn’t a certification process. You didn’t get a notarized letter formally saying you were friends with someone. It was just a thing that happened. And how weird was that? For people to decide they were friends? Seemed like a lot of assumption was involved. Bea hated assumptions.

“Plus it’s Halloween soon so the timing is crucial,” Mae said, oblivious.

How did Bea become friends with Jackie? It was so long ago she couldn’t even remember. It all seemed so effortless when you were a kid. They shared classes, they had similar interests, Jackie punched someone who threw Bea’s History book in a puddle. Friendship just happened. Was Angus a friend? When did that become a thing? For a long time he was just this guy Bea had a few conversations with. Were they in friend territory now? She had just left him after hanging out with him and his date, so they definitely weren’t passing strangers to one another anymore. Bea thought she really would have liked a notarized letter. That seemed like a much clearer system to her. Less possibility of making a fool out of herself.

“So… like… maybe some time in the next couple days? Maybe? Hello? Helloooooo Bea!”

Bea jolted back to the here and now. Mae looked up at her expectantly.

“Um… O… Kay,” Bea said. She could practically feel the gears in her head spinning up to their proper speed. “Yes. Okay. Okay. I guess that could be interesting. Yes. That’s a good idea. I just… maybe on a day off. Since I work evenings now.”

“Yeah, definitely!” Mae said and she beamed at Bea again.

It was… nice.

By the time they had returned to the Glass Factory they were chatting idly and it was actually quite pleasant, Bea found. She had more opportunities to relentlessly tease Mae about the scene she had made outside the bowling alley and that was a plus.

They were directly across the street from the art center when Mae smacked her head. “Aw, dang!”

“What? What’s wrong?”

“I totally forgot I was planning on taking some shoes from the bowling alley. You know when Gregg mentioned it? Man. Next time, huh?”

Bea let out a long sigh. “Sure. Give me your phone,” she said with her hand held out.

“Oh! Okay,” said Mae. She pulled it out of her pants pocket, unlocking it before she handed it over.

Bea tapped at the screen. “Here’s my number. And my chattrBox handle. We can talk about our schedules and when we can make this ghost thing work.” She had been overcome by the desire to reciprocate on the whole friend thing. It also felt nice.

“Yeah!” said Mae. “I’ll, uh, yeah! I’ll do that!” She murmured something else incoherent that Bea ignored. She handed Mae her phone and stood back.

“Then I’ll see you later.”

“Yeah. That’s cool. See you later!”

Bea turned south to walk back to Jackie’s. Mae, she noted, stayed right there at the Glass Factory and waved from the entrance doors before entering the building.

Walking away, Bea imagined Mae drawing her impression of the day’s events on her huge butcher sheet paper. She couldn’t deny she was looking forward to it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [tumblr](https://eldritchgarboandcosmicmalloy.tumblr.com)


	9. Transmission Routes

**hey hey hey test test test is that u beebee**

_I’m going to guess this is Mae_   
_Also beebee? Really?_

**just testin ur handle**   
**also ur nickname**

_Handle yes, nickname very no_

**aw fiiiiiine beeeeeeea**   
**also is it cool if i give angus ur deetz?**

_I didn’t know he used this_

**he didnt but then i was all like hey be on it**   
**and he was all like o ok sure**   
**long story short now he be on it**

_Thanks. You really took me on a journey_   
_Okay I guess. Don’t go making a habit of it_

**aw no way dude**   
**ur digits are a scared trust**

_I’m going to interpret that in the most charitable way I can_

**thx ur the best lol**   
**dropping by soon?**

_If you mean am I going to the Glass Factory, yes. I work there. Be there tomorrow._

**coolcool cya then!**

~~~

**Bea?**

_This is she_

**Cool. This is Angus**   
**Still trying to figure this interface out. I’m not really a social media person**

_Take your time_

**Okay**   
**So**   
**I feel like the first thing I should say is**   
**Gregg and I did not have sex**

_Wow_   
_I feel like that’s the last thing you should say_   
_But condolences I guess?_   
_What am I supposed to do with this information?_

**I’m just saying**   
**When we parted, I felt Mae had misconstrued what was going on**   
**We really did just play video games**   
**And also maybe we made out a little bit**

_This continues to be too much information_   
_But congrats?_

**Thanks**   
**I just felt like I had to clarify**

_You really didn’t_   
_But thanks I guess. For reasons that aren’t totally apparent to me at the moment your compulsive need to update me on your romantic life is kind of endearing._

**Aw**   
**You’re my friend too, Bea**

_Go to hell, thanks_

**Ha ha ha**

~~~

They were short conversations but Bea scrolled through them several times on her phone. She did so while fully aware that it was kind of sad. This was the kind of behavior that made her consider the merits of hurling herself bodily into traffic.

She had assumed that she had outgrown this kind of giddiness. As a grown-ass adult woman, the whole ‘I made friends’ thing shouldn’t make her feel like a school girl.

And yet.

Jackie walked in from her bedroom and Bea started like she was seen in a compromising position. This didn’t escape Jackie’s attention, and judging from the upward twitch of her lips she could guess the reason.

“Have a good time with your new friends?” Jackie said.

Only sheer obstinate will kept Bea from admitting anything. “What makes you say that?”

“Bea, you’re the only person I know who treats having a friend like you just got caught watching porn.”

“Maybe I belong to a highly specialized religious cult and any kind of fraternization is a deadly sin.”

“Tough to keep a congregation like that together.”

“We meet on the internet.”

“That sounds about right. So you have fun?”

“Yes, yes. Fine.”

“This is adorable.”

“Shut up,” said Bea “You going somewhere?” 

Jackie had her laptop in a bag slung over one shoulder. She pat down her pockets.

“Brainstorming session. There’s going to be a townhall for the proposed turnUP HQ expansion. We’re organizing to lean hard on the city council to, well, the ideal would be to block the expansion entirely, but right now we’re aiming to force them to make the negotiations public.”

“Wouldn’t negotiating the seizure of land to a tech company have to be public?” said Bea.

“You’d think.” Jackie gave Bea a bright, toothy smile. “And if we stomp on council members hard enough, maybe it will be.”

“Hope you brought your big boots.”

“Bea. I always bring my big boots.”

Jackie waved and stepped outside. The door latching back in place behind her echoed in the apartment.

A part of Bea was eager to get back to work tomorrow and she felt like she should resent that. She wondered if it was her fault that two days off had left her a little stir crazy. Perhaps this wouldn’t have happened, she reasoned, if she had spent her time better. This line of thought in turn made her feel guilty. A person shouldn’t feel guilty about their leisure time, Bea was quite sure. She had socialized, and enjoyed doing it. And still here she was feeling mentally icky. This was not what the extroverts had promised.

Resolving that she wouldn’t solve this by being cooped up inside, Bea stepped out of the apartment. She stood on the stoop and leaned against the rail and breathed in the autumn-crisp air. Night was approaching faster and faster with each passing day. It was a relentlessness that Bea was beginning to find alarming. With her current frame of mind, she imagined she could close her eyes and feel the world spin beneath her, rushing her through vast empty spaces.

Bea felt the need for a cigarette, but she had left them inside. A brief internal struggle between the forces of addiction and idleness warred within her. Idleness won. She filled her lungs with the cold, bright air and let it out slowly. The sting of late autumn passing through her nostrils helped to stir her out of her mood.

Without being consciously aware of it, Bea pulled her phone of her pocket and scrolled through the brief conversations once again.

~~~

“Still remember how to use a mop? Haw haw haw!”

Bea allowed for a small, patient smile while the Janitor laughed at his own joke. Sure enough, he soon descended into a hacking cough. Sweet karma.

“Good to see the place hadn’t burned down while I was gone.”

“Oh, we managed,” said the Janitor after he had taken a swig of Fiascola. “Good work on that seasonal studio, by the way. It’s already a hit.”

“I noticed,” said Bea. When she had walked into the Glass Factory to clock in, there had been a crowd at the extra large studio she had put together. She had meant to check the place but the crowd had dissuaded her.

“So,” said the Janitor, “what with Halloween coming soon, things are getting a mite busy. Mostly at closing. Lots of clean up. Other than that, it’s business as usual.” The Janitor gestured to the day’s work orders and clipboard for the Black Goat. Bea nodded and with a deep breath, she dove in.

Someone had clogged the drains with discarded oil paint. Again. There was another build up of gunk in the ducts. Someone had thrown a pumpkin against the outside wall. A bird had flown into the cafe and needed to be herded out. Maintenance had received a complaint from one of the studios that there was a clanging sound coming from one of the air vents and Bea spent a good chunk of time teetering from a step ladder chasing phantom noises until she decided this guy just had a creeping case of tinnitus. All throughout, she cleaned and collected garbage and generally made sure the place remained suitable for human habitation.

By the end of her shift she was dizzy from paint thinner and had walked the full length of the Glass Factory more times than she could count. She cursed her past self, who had been wistful for work. She was sweaty and smelly and there was some kind of residue under her fingernails she suspected would not wash off and her knees were in a state of rebellion.

When it came time to pamper the Black Goat, it was nearly a relief to get away from the Glass Factory proper. Nearly, because two entire days away had allowed some of that uncanny aura to creep back in. It seemed more like the slumbering beast that she had encountered on that first day rather than the baroque, eccentric machine she had learned to maintain. At one point in her ministrations she had forgotten a step and the Black Goat playfully shot a bolt from a pressure plate just past her ankle with enough force to chip the concrete that it hit.

Bea hastily corrected her oversight, gave the Black Goat the finger, then turned and walked out.

The whoosh and the clatter and the buzz of light bulbs and pipes and vents turned into a background of white noise that crept up Bea’s spine as she walked. This would be a fantastic lurking corridor. As someone who had partaken in a good lurk as a hight schooler, Bea could see this and appreciate it. She could imagine it now; surly teens would squat in a huddle and the background static would drown out any attempts at a conversation. They could be isolated but not alone and stare sullenly at industrial fixtures. She wondered if she could broach the subject to the Director. Tell Quelcy that she could open this place to goth teens as a public service. Like a skate park, but for lurking. A person could shoot an _amazing_ music video down here.

Just so long as Bea didn’t have to clean up after them.

~~~

Bea found Mae near a supply closet, fiddling with the door.

“Uh. Mae?”

Mae spun around. Her eyes widened and ran one hand through her hair. “Oh, wow, hey Bea!”

“What are you doing?”

“Um… looking… for you!” said Mae.

“Really? Are you okay?” There was an unsteadiness to the way Mae stood that struck Bea.

“What? Yeah, no, I’m good. But hey, you busy?”

“I’m literally at work, Mae.”

“You can take a break though, right?”

“I used up my last break.”

Mae’s shoulders slumped. Bea ran her tongue over her teeth and looked away in thought. Her shift wasn’t for much longer and there was nothing left except for routine clean up. She looked at Mae again.

“Aren’t you supposed to be doing Halloween stuff?”

“Finished,” said Mae.

“Really?”

“Yes, really. Jeez, Bea. They didn’t want me to do much work anyway. Just make some designs that they could die-cut. I mean, originally I think they wanted more? Like, to design a pamphlet or something like that? But I think my aesthetic is too concrete fantasy apocalypse for them, you know?”

“I really don’t.”

“Well, Quelcy stopped asking me to give her new designs after I drew a bunch of giant draculas made out of abandoned warehouses.”

Bea sighed. “Look, if you really want to hang out then you can.”

“Nice,” said Mae.

“But I have to _work_ , Mae. No distractions.”

“Sure. I’ll be totally professional. We’re gonna clean the hell out of the place.”

“Thats… no. Whatever. Just come if you’re gonna.” Bea walked away and Mae trailed behind her.

~~~

“I always thought janitor carts were kind of cool,” Mae said as she watched Bea extract one from the tangle of gear in the supply closet.

“You’re probably the only person in this building if not this planet who feels that way,” said Bea. She grunted as she untangled a rubber hose from the wheels. The damn things always found a way to get themselves snarled up on everything.

“It’s got everything you need, all on a single cart. I appreciate. Like. I don’t know. Just having something that holds all the tools of your trade. Like a squire for a knight. ‘My sword, squire!’ and then they gallop off to fight a dragon.”

“No dragons here,” said Bea. “Just mops and spray bottles.”

She gestured at plastic bottles hanging from a rack. Mae looked at them like they were museum curios. “There’s, like, five different colors here.”

Bea kicked the brakes up on the cart and pushed it. “The blue one is for glass. The orange one is for graffiti. The clear one is just soap. The one that’s clear but also kind of thick and bubbly is degreaser. You don’t want to mix those two up. Soap is harmless but the degreaser will eat your skin off.”

“Nice.”

“Yup. Real nice.”

“Do you guys have, like, that floor polisher thing? And it’s motorized? And it has a circular pad that goes around?”

“We do.”

“Ever ride one? We should ride them and it’ll be like bumper cars.”

“No, Mae. That’s abusing the equipment.”

“If I was a janitor I’d do cool things once the building closes. Like pour soap all over the floor and slide on it.”

Bea spent the closing hour of the Glass Factory with Mae trailing behind her as she cleaned studio windows and picked up trash. The cleaning had become pretty routine pretty fast. Having Mae tag along was different. The jury was out on whether she was entertaining or annoying. Either way she was a distraction and Bea could say she needed a distraction about as often as she’d prefer not to have one.

Mae helped. Or she tried to, at least. She’d range out in front of the cart, picking up discarded coffee cups or newspapers or pamphlets. She’d clean windows. There was a lackadaisical quality to her work. She’d pick up litter and be good at it for a while, but then she’d lose focus and make a game of tossing trash into garbage bins from a distance to mixed success. She’d clean windows, but stop halfway or leave streaks where she wiped. It was a bit like having a puppy as an assistant.

“Do you do this all the time?” said Mae. She stopped at a studio window, sprayed it with cleaning solution and started doodling skulls on the slick surface. Bea listened to her finger squeak against the glass.

“I mean, what is it you think janitors do?” Bea said.

“Clean, I guess. But I don’t think you, like, clean all the time. There’s only so much surface that needs to be wiped.” On the other side of the glass, an artist who had been bent over a wire and bead sculpture looked up and made an irritated gesture at Mae. Mae made a face and walked away.

“There’s lots of surface, Mae. All they ever do is get dirty.” Bea rolled her cart up to the window Mae had left and finished the job.

“Huh. All they ever do is get dirty. That’s a good way of putting it.” Mae slowed down and walked besides Bea. “Like, dust just piles up, right? It doesn’t disappear on its own. Dust and dirt and litter and all that stuff. Like, someone has to pick it all up and put it somewhere. Or it just stays there and more and more of it piles up. Left on its own, this place would naturally get crummier. It’s like, entropy or whatever. Someone has to spend the energy to make it not that way, you know?” Before Bea could reply, Mae skipped ahead and hopped onto a cement planter.

That was the thing with Mae. She’d blithely yammer on and on. Then she’d say something that was actually sort of interesting. It made her worth being around. Maybe not all the time. Just enough to provide a carefree perspective that Bea found spontaneous and unexpected.

_Congratulations, Beatrice,_ she thought to herself, you just discovered a wordy way to say “Mae is fun.” 

And so what if Bea circled the concept of “fun” like a wary scavenger circles a dying animal, alert to any twitch of a limb that might suggest that it could bite back? So what if Bea regarded “fun” the way a food critic might regard a proletarian tater tot that had found its way in a gourmet platter of _pommes dauphine_ , gripping it daintily between thumb and forefinger as if to minimize the contamination that physical contact might inflict? Bea had earned her aversion to fun. Fun was something for people who didn’t live paycheck to paycheck, for people who were secure enough in their most basic needs that they could go out and seek luxuries like basic as hell entertainment.

Jackie tried, bless her. Jackie had managed a work/life balance that Bea envied. She worked, then she had fun. Aside from a brief observer’s foray into karaoke and the previous day’s bowling, Bea genuinely could not remember having the time to have fun.

Now she was resorting to having fun on company time. She watched Mae balance on the planter, arms outstretched on either side of her in a pose of unexpected grace. Then she jumped off and stuck the landing and she was smiling with an unguarded expression that made Bea smile back.

“I think it’s pretty cool,” Mae said.

Bea schooled her smile into brutal submission. “What’s cool?”

“Like, just keeping the place clean, you know? Like, my studio is kind of a disaster.”

“Artists are responsible for their own studio space.”

“Ha. I know, dork. I’m not asking you to clean it. It’s just… I could clean it up. But then I’d have to keep cleaning it. Constantly. I can barely keep track of what day it is. It’s just not something I can do.”

“It would probably help if you were being paid for it,” Bea said. “It’s the reason I’m doing this.”

“True. How do you keep _your_ place clean?”

“It helps that my ‘place’ is a couch.”

“Oh. Right. I keep forgetting. So I guess you don’t have a lot of, like, stuff?”

“I have some clothes. A laptop. And…” Bea thought of the box underneath her wheeled suitcase. “A few mementos. From home.”

“Is the plural of ‘memento’ spelled with an ‘e?’ M-o-m-e-n-t-o-e-s?”

“I’m pretty sure it isn’t,” said Bea. “Also there’s only one ‘o.’”

“Oh.”

“That’s a specific question,” Bea said.

“Eh, don’t look too deep into it. Are you doing anything for Halloween?”

“Working.”

“Yeah. Me too, probably,” Mae said. She picked up an abandoned paper cup from the cafe that had been left underneath a water fountain. She tossed it at a nearby garbage bin. Droplets of cold, milky brown coffee sprayed from the cup as it bounced off the rim and tumbled end over end back onto the floor. Mae cleared her throat, looked up at Bea who was looking sternly down at her, then jogged over and picked up the cup and discarded it without the theatrics.

Bea wrung out her mop and got to mopping.

“Back home,” Mae said, “There’d be this big party in town called Harfest and there would be a parade down the main street and tents set on the sidewalk where you could play carnival games or get your fortune read. It was the one time people from outside of town actually visited.”

“Sounds okay.” Bea said as she swirled the mop around and through the spill.

“I guess. I was the only person my age who cared. Everyone else either stayed home or were working.”

“Maybe they didn’t have the time for fun.”

“Maybe. Did they have anything like that? Where you were from?”

“It wasn’t called Harfest but it wasn’t all that different,” said Bea. “Harfest is kind of an awful name.”

“Cool parade, though.”

“We had a hayride, I suppose. And a corn maze.”

“Oh, hell yeah. I love a corn maze.”

“I only went once. It made me nervous.” Bea returned the mop to its bucket, unfolded a “wet floor” sign and placed it where she had cleaned. Then she pushed the cart along.

“Like, you were scared?” Mae kept pace alongside her, fidgeting along the way like she was burning off excess energy.

“No. Like nervous. There’d be people in costumes that hid in the corn and they’d burst out and some of them made me feel unsafe.”

“Isn’t that the point?” said Mae.

“The point is that you’re supposed to feel scared,” said Bea. “You’re supposed to be scared that there’s a chainsaw maniac jumping out from the plants making scary noises. But I wasn’t scared of chainsaw maniacs. I guess I was more worried about who the person was, underneath the Halloween mask. Like you’re alone on this farm field late at night and there’s a guy in a mask pretending to be someone else and he’s specifically supposed to make you scared. And that made me uncomfortable.”

“Oh,” said Mae. “Well. I guess it’s more fun in a group.”

“Didn’t really have anyone to go with.”

“Dude, I’ll go with you.”

“Seeing as how there isn’t a corn maze for miles, I don’t think that will ever come up,” said Bea.

“Holy shit,” said Mae. “You know what would be awesome? What if we made, like, the place underneath us into like a haunted house?”

“What?”

“You know, the place with all the creepy lights and sounds and heavy machinery? You told me to stop going there? For some reason?”

“The ‘employees only’ signs should be reason enough.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Mae said, waving her hand as if that important detail were an unpleasant smell hanging in the air. “But, like, think of it! It’s spooky as hell and most of the work is already done. Like, the lights are all flickering and there’s a creepy echo and stuff, it wouldn’t take much more decorating!”

Bea would endure sadistic Inquisitorial punishment before publicly admitting that she had nearly the same idea early in her shift. She could see it in her mind’s eye though. Skeletons clinging to the pipes, ambient whispers from concealed speakers. Fog machines.

It would probably be pretty badass.

“I mean I guess,” she said. “Like a maze.”

“A corn maze!” Mae said. “Except instead of corn, it’s walls. And instead of out in a field, it’s in a city. And instead of farm creeps, uh…”

“City creeps,” said Bea.

“Yeah. I guess the creeps are a constant.”

“Seems that way, doesn’t it?”

“I’ll be there to kick their ass though,” said Mae. “One time, I, uh… uh…”

Mae’s voice trailed off and in the silence the wheels on Bea’s cart squeaked prominently.

“Uh?” said Bea. She dug through a compartment in her cart. There was a wad of gum stuck to the floor that was just begging for the scraper.

“Uh, nothing. Just some dumb thing I did back in school.”

“School’s a good place for that,” said Bea. She returned to her work.

“Uh. Yeah. Anyways, about that maze —”

“There’s no time to set that up plus I bet you’d need some kind of permit.”

“Really? Are haunted houses licensed?”

“I don’t really know, Mae,” Bea said. Weariness crept into her voice. She liked to pride herself as a night owl, because bags under her eyes and a certain aversion to daylight was an aesthetic she could appreciate when she was young and had things like “energy.” Nowadays she could feel her body wind down as the dark set in, and right now she was on the downturn.

Mae, on the other hand, seemed like she was fully prepared to get into five consecutive fist fights and win each one. Bea dearly wanted to learn her secret.

“But, you know, there’s something pretty cool about a maze that’s carved out of vegetation,” Mae said.

“Not really something that I think about,” said Bea.

“Like, I don’t know, you can feel the plant life around you and it’s just, whoa, I’m surrounded by these living things and they’ve been trampled down to make a path for me. You ever walk down a transmission route?”

“A what?” said Bea.

“You know when an electric company needs to build transmission towers through, like, forests and stuff? So they just clear cut a narrow band through the forest that’s just wide enough for the towers and the power lines? That’s a transmission route.”

Oh, yeah, no, I can’t say I’ve ever been. Why?”

“They’re just creepy. Like… flattened stretches of forest, no roads or anything. Strings suspended up in the sky. It’s like a highway, but not for humans. For energy. It’s like part of this great big machine that we don’t even see. And the machine, like, serves us. But we see so little of it. Long stretches of earth flattened for our benefit and something huge and metal standing in its place, alone except for other towers that just stand there, on a highway built by humans, but not for humans. Like there’s this secret world we don’t even see, and a hidden machine that’s always working. And it’s all, like, forgotten. Forgotten knowledge that’s still there in plain sight.”

“Hm. Evocative.”

Mae shrugged, something helpless and loose like a marionette. “So do you clean the whoooole place?”

“That’s kind of my job, as we established.”

“Yeah, but by yourself? Seems bad.”

“And yet here I am.”

“There’s a guy in one of the studios who keeps his place clean using a robot. You know, one of those things that’s all flat and on wheels? You know him?”

“I do,” Bea said. “Last week his robot got stuck on an electric cord and ate through the insulation and started an electrical fire.”

“Huh,” said Mae. “So that’s what that alarm was for. I thought it was a drill.”

“Give them time and they’ll invent me out of a job eventually,” said Bea. “But we’re not there yet.”

“No way. I’ll smash the shit out of any robot they bring in.”

“I appreciate the loyalty, Mae.”

They eventually came up to the end of the building that had Mae’s studio and Bea looked up at the doodles that framed Mae’s door.

“Come on, don’t look at that,” Mae said, plaintive.

“Why not?”

“It’s embarrassing.”

“You have this set up in front of decent foot traffic.” Bea searched out the negative space where the new doodles were added. “Do you use like a step ladder to write on these things?”

“I have a whole process,” said Mae. “It’s dumb, though. Like, there’s probably a blatantly obvious better way to do it but I haven’t sat down to hash it out. On account I don’t really think about these things so let’s not waste our time.”

Bea found it: a sketch of Gregg and Angus, largely unidentifiable but for Angus’ little hat. They were holding hands. Bea squinted. No. They were holding a hamburger between them. “BURGERS BOWLING AND BOYS”, Mae had written underneath. And beneath that: “NOTE TO SELF: STEAL MORE MOMENTOES FROM BOWLING ALLEYS.”

Then below that was Bea’s stand-in, surrounded by ghostly apparitions. “BEA KNOWS THE BEST GHOST PLACES.”

And then under that, Gregg’s stand in with a caption: “GREGG RULZ OK”

“Are we done?” Mae said. She nudged the cart impatiently and it bumped Bea’s hip.

“Why don’t you like people looking at your work?” said Bea.

“I don’t care if people look, I care if people I _know_ look.”

Bea got behind the cart and pushed. “It’s not awful,” she said.

“Very uplifting. It’s just kinda hard to justify this stuff being here,” said Mae. She took the lead, eager to lead Bea away from this place. “It’s like, here’s oil paintings. Here’s glass sculptures. Here’s idiot doodles for babies. I don’t really hang.”

“Art is subjective, you know.”

Mae looked over her shoulder to give Bea a glare. Bea shrugged back.

They returned to the main floor. Save for a cluster at the cafe, people had largely cleared out as closing time neared.

“Shouldn’t you be leaving soon?” Bea said.

“Huh? Oh, no. I’m, uh, working late.”

“You? Working late?”

“I don’t appreciate that kind of skepticism, Bea.” Mae said, narrowing her eyes in mock offense.

Bea smiled a crooked smile. There were a few student artists that worked late, a thing she had learned soon after taking the night shifts. She let the Janitor deal with them, and he didn’t seem to mind. “Skepticism stowed,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“You must have a pretty crazy schedule, though,” Bea said. “Between here and college and work.”

Mae’s eyes swiveled to the ceiling and she tilted her head to one side in a motion to suggest she was carrying a heavy burden. “Oh, dude, it’s killer. Like I’m basically constantly stressing and I feel like I’m in one of those movies where a natural disaster, like, destroys a city. Just when I get clear of one hazard another basically drops me into a worse situation, you know? My schedule does _not_ let up. I need a break. Like, a year-long break.”

“Can relate,” said Bea.

“Right? I mean, I kinda… I mean, I had like, a thing where… uh…” Mae balled her hands up into fists and brought them up to her chest, where she knocked her knuckles against one another. “Like, I did before, but that only made things worse.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, like, so, a few years back, right? I kinda dropped out of college.”

“Really,” said Bea.

“I kinda had, like, this, uh, issue? I guess?”

“Did something bad happen?”

Mae shrugged. “No… I mean. It was… whatever. It was an issue. And I had to go back home. Or. I didn’t _have_ to. I just… really needed to.”

_Can’t relate_ , Bea thought, though she stayed silent.

“My parents were pissed, obviously. But… I was like, not hearing it. And I was like that for a year. Up in my old room, sleeping until four in the afternoon and wandering around town and not coming back home until late.”

“You didn’t work or anything?” said Bea.

“I mean, they tried to find me a job, but it never stuck. I don’t know. Working sucks.”

“I don’t think you’re the first to feel that way, but people still do it.”

“I know,” said Mae, a touch sullen. Then she brightened. “You just gotta be prepared to live the guerrilla lifestyle, right? Live off the land! Craft your shelter from sticks and leaves! Weave rough-hewn clothes from plant fibers and animal fur!”

“Or live off your parents,” said Bea.

“Yeah, well… Yeah. I’d like to live off the grid someday. Just me and some land where I could grow food. Drink from a nearby freshwater spring. I’d need meat though. Which means I’d need to deal with animals… animal poop… and butchering them for meat. I think I could do that, though…” Mae looked off into the middle distance as they walked.

“So you did that for a year?”

Refocusing to the present, Mae looked at Bea. “Yeah. Did you know that it’s actually kind of hard to drop out of college? Like, as long as your GPA isn’t in the actual toilet, they basically keep a spot open for you. And nobody even really notices when you leave. There’s a hole where a person should be, but nobody actually sees it and they just assume you’re gonna come back.”

“No sense in missing out on tuition money, I suppose.”

“That’s probably it,” said Mae. “My parents and I kinda… talked it out.”

Bea politely ignored the heavy pause in that sentence and grunted in a kind of acknowledgment.

“And they got me to come back. Uh. Yeah.”

Bea could practically feel the yawning chasm of unspoken words. She knew it well enough, having had her own share of awkward conversations in Old Harbor. She decided to do for Mae what she had desperately wished people would do for her. She gave Mae a pass.

“So that’s worked out, then,” she said.

“Oh, yeah! Totally! Uh. I mean, it’s still, I feel… whatever. Uh, you met Professor Chazokov? After we crashed the stage? I dunno, he teaches astronomy and I was in his class in sophomore year. I guess he likes me for some reason and he’s been kind of keeping an eye on me. And Gregg came with me when I came back and that’s cool.”

“Gregg’s from your town?”

“Yeah. We’ve been friends for a long time. And, I dunno. Having him here helps. Something familiar, I guess.”

“He just came? Because he wanted to help you?”

“Right? I mean, he didn’t have much going on back home. He was working in a convenience store and he was, like, the only gay dude in deep mountain country so… there wasn’t anything there for him.”

“Are you roommates?”

“No. He doesn’t live in Old Harbor. He has a cousin who goes to school in Bright Harbor. She’s super cool. She has a crossbow and she goes to fashion design college. I didn’t even know that was a thing. But Gregg lives with her and her roommate. Just gets off the boat at the end of the day and walks right into the city.”

“Huh. Nice, I guess.” 

“Yeah. Possum Springs’ loss is my gain,” Mae said.

Bea craned her neck to look at Mae. “You lived in Possum Springs?” she said.

“Yeah. It’s kind of a shitty little town, but I don’t know. I like it. I miss it. What about you?”

“Briddle,” said Bea. The word came out harsh and sharp.

Mae’s whole body perked up. “Holy shit! Seriously? That’s like 15 minutes from Possum Springs! We’re practically neighbors! I can’t believe you’re from there.”

“Not originally. We moved when I was young. My parents actually chose between Briddle and Possum Springs.”

“Oh, dang. We could’ve known each other like way earlier. What did Briddle have that Possum Springs didn’t?”

“Cheaper homes,” said Bea.

“Huh, I guess,” said Mae. She stared straight ahead as if on autopilot. “Dang, it’s a small world. So what was it like there?”

It wasn’t very fair, Bea knew, to end the conversation there. Mae had shared a lot and it seemed only right that Bea share in turn. But she was not about to get into her past. It was, as far as she was concerned, as far from here as Briddle. Far from here as her father’s miserable little hardware store. Far from here as their depressing apartment.

Far from here as her mother’s tombstone.

Fortunately, she didn’t have to think of a graceful way to recuse herself from the topic, because it was at that moment when her cart hit something. She felt it yield under the uneven wheels. Dirty mop water sloshed threateningly in its bucket as her cart jolted to a stop.

“The hell…” Bea muttered as she circled around to the front of the cart. Mae went around the other side.

Bea stopped in her tracks.

“Oh. My. God.”

“What?” said Mae.

Bea stared down at the thing under her cart. “Is that an arm?” 

“Whoa what.”

Curled beneath the wheel were pale, thick fingers. Bea could see the dirt under jagged fingernails. The palm was wedged under the wheel and she could see the criss-cross pattern of faint white scars across gnarled knuckles. Hurriedly, as if she could somehow prevent further injury, she pushed the cart off. Now she could see the whole of the dismembered limb. There was a waxy quality to the skin. Below the wrist it was wrapped in a torn sleeve of rough green camo. Where the sleeve ended the arm was a pulpy red ragged mess. The flesh was torn and glistening. A knobby protrusion of white in the center where the bone was exposed.

“It’s like… all gross,” said Mae. She was opposite of Bea, the arm between them. She was squatting, hand on her knees and eyes wide with fascination. “Look at how shiny the, uh, stump is! That means the blood is fresh right? But there’s no blood on the floor, so someone had to dropped it here.”

Bea looked around. Other than the cafe stragglers, they were alone. Then a sound caught her attention and she turned back to see Mae at the cart, pulling the bristle broom from its caddy.

“Mae, what are you doing?”

Mae looked at her, that glint in her eye like when she had brought down the stage. “I’m gonna poke it with a stick.”

“Mae! That’s evidence! This is a crime scene!”

Mae ignored her and pointed the broom’s handle at the dismembered limb. Bea watched, impassive and morbidly curious. With the broom handle shaking in her grip, Mae pressed it against the arm, near the bloody stump.

And it…

“That doesn’t look right,” said Bea. She was not an expert on severe bodily trauma, but she figured blood should act more… liquid. And the arm moved in a boneless way that didn’t make sense.

“Yeah,” said Mae. She stepped in closer. “And it doesn’t smell right.” She reached out and picked the arm up, keeping her grip on the sleeve.

“Goddammit, Mae. Don’t just —”

“Hey! That’s mine!”

Bea flinched away. Something rushed past her towards Mae and grabbed at the arm. Bea got the impression of a dark red shape topped with a dusty gray. Mae, engrossed by the arm, was caught off guard. It took her a moment to realize she was now staring at her own empty hands.

“What the hell!” she said as she looked up.

Backing away from them was a girl in a large, dusty maroon coat. Or maybe it was a regular-sized coat and she was just small. She was slight and the coat was ill-fitting around her shoulders. Wary brown eyes looked between Mae and Bea from underneath a messy mop of ash blonde hair. 

“I was looking for this!” Her voice was high, squeaky, and a little indignant. She held the arm to her chest.

“How is that yours?” said Mae. “You’ve _got_ both of yours. What, you keep a spare just in case?”

The girl rolled her eyes. “It’s mine because I made it! Then _someone_ took it and walked out of my studio!” She stared accusing daggers at Mae. The girl spoke in gasping punctuations and her chest heaved alarmingly, as if she had run a marathon rather than jogged across a short distance.

“Dude, if I stole from you, you wouldn’t even know,” said Mae. “I’m basically a master. Anyway it’s not my fault that —”

“Mae, take it easy,” said Bea. She turned to the girl. She wasn’t familiar, but Bea hardly knew every artist leasing a studio here. “You’re from the seasonal studio space, aren’t you? Lori? I think? That’s the name I was given.”

Lori turned her glare at Bea and nodded.

“I’m the one who put your studio together,” said Bea. “I hope you like it.”

Mae and Bea watched as Lori wrestled to control her breathing. Once she managed to school it, she looked at Bea. “It’s fine.” Her voice was unexpectedly subdued.

“Okay,” said Bea. “If there’s any issue, let me know. You can dial me using the maintenance extension. My name’s Bea.”

Lori tilted her head and Bea could see her eyes dart to the name tag she wore. “It says —”

“It’s a typo,” she said quickly.

“Dude, you made that arm?” Mae said. “That’s badass! It totally looks lifelike! Or. Deadlike. You know what I mean.”

“It looks like crap,” said Lori.

“What? No way. I was totally fooled. For like, a moment.” Mae appended the last statement quickly.

Lori made a little sound. Then she turned to Bea. “Actually, I needed to ask someone about the equipment you set up. Can I show you?”

“Yeah,” said Bea.

Nodding once, Lori turned away from them and walked back to her studio.

Bea followed, pushing her cart along. Mae, unprompted, fell in beside her.

“I was totally not fooled,” Mae whispered to Bea. “I was just saying that to make her feel better.”

“Sure, Mae. Sure.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [tumblr](https://eldritchgarboandcosmicmalloy.tumblr.com)


	10. Windows and Masks

The last time Bea had been in Lori Meyer’s studio, the shelves were immaculately clean. The floor was freshly waxed. The windows streak-free and gleaming. Bea knew all this, because she had done it all herself.

“Is it possible for there to be too many decapitated heads?” Mae said. “I’m not saying that this is too many, but we’re definitely at the point where the question has to be asked.”

Bloody heads were mounted on metal stands arrayed all along the shelves. They had stringy hair and grisly injuries. Under Bea’s feet, she felt the familiar grit of sawdust and shavings. Molds and wooden blocks and tools were piled up against the windows. Much of the floor space was taken up by work benches with buckets of chemicals piled underneath them. The vents rattled as they worked to draw fumes out of the air.

“Um. Don’t touch anything unless you’re wearing gloves,” said Lori as she pushed past Bea and Mae. They had been gawking in front of the entrance for some time. “This stuff bonds to moisture so it will stain skin and stuff?”

“Oh dang, so you can’t sell this?” said Mae.

“Um. No. Once they’re properly cured they’re harmless. It’s Halloween masks. Harmless, but smells bad.”

“I can’t believe you just make this stuff here!” said Mae. “These are so awesome! Bea, look! This one’s got its jawbone all hanging out! How did you make these so quickly? These are like professional movie props!”

“I didn’t,” said Lori. She tried gamely to appear aloof but if Bea was any judge, Lori was surprised and pleased at Mae’s reaction. “These are all old projects. I was going to put them out for display but then they told me they were too gory!”

“They are a bit much,” said Bea. She looked at a sculpture where the head had been split with a cleaver. The detail of the eye dangling from its optic nerve was… admirable. “There are kids.”

“Kids love this stuff! It’s the parents that are always babies about it,” said Lori in a huff.

“Yeah, Bea. Parents are babies,” said Mae. “Oh man. I remember this one time when I was like eight, my Dad dressed up like the Wolfman and jumped out at me right when I was coming home from school. I peed my pants and cried for, like, five hours straight. Mom was so mad.”

“That’s… horrible,” said Bea.

“Naw,” said Mae. “It’s hilarious. Granddad always told me spooky stories when he was reading me to sleep and I think Dad wanted to be the spooky one for once. But his idea of spooky was wearing a smelly carpet and a dog mask and he had to sleep on the couch that night.”

“Okay it’s funnier now that you added context.”

“What does that have to do with anything I just said?” said Lori.

“I find it’s better to just roll with it when Mae is telling stories,” said Bea.

“So do you just make horror stuff?” said Mae.

“Pretty much,” said Lori. “I attend a film school, it’s right next to the Bright Harbor Public Access Station?” She posed the statement as a question and searched Mae and Bea’s expressions for a hint of recognition. “It’s got the satellite tower with the big blinky red lights? Across the river? You can see it?”

“Uh, Bright Harbor is just a whole wad of big blinky lights,” said Mae.

“She’s not wrong,” said Bea.

Lori made a face. “Whatever! Anyway, I, uh, wanna make horror movies only they don’t really specialize in that stuff so my adviser said that I should apply for studio space here and that my financial aid would cover it and it would give me a lot of practical experience.” She took a deep breath, then reached up and dragged a box off a work bench and sat on a chair, box in her lap. The box was composed of two halves, held together around the edges by wing nuts and bolts.

“I’ve been making arrangements for this place for, like, months,” Lori said as she twisted the wing nuts off one by one. “Practicing how to make props and stuff by using these fiberglass molds and resins a-and all that stuff. I had to make all sorts of prototypes to show the, uh, board or whatever. They’re super interested in commercial work. Stuff you can sell. So I timed my presentation for the fall, with Halloween around the corner.”

She popped the top off the box. “Should be dry now. These are all molds. Foam latex is a more flexible material, but I use polyurethane cuz it’s more durable…” Lori popped out the mold and —

“Holy shit,” Mae said as Lori held up a mask. “Wolfman.” She held her hands out as if to take the mask but Lori leaned away.

“S-sorry,” she said. “But this is a commission so I’d rather not handle it too much.”

“You make custom Halloween masks!” Mae said. “That’s so awesome! Holy shit, that’s way better than me! That’s better than pretty much everyone else in this building!”

Lori’s cheeks flushed and she looked away. She twisted the mask in her hands before catching herself and placing it back into the box. “It’s okay, I guess,” she said.

“Can you make anything? Like, can you make skulls and stuff like that?”

“As long as I have a mold and the dyes and the resin, yeah,” said Lori. “If someone wants a custom thing then I have to make the mold and that’s extra time and money. I make props too. Or. I guess they’re Halloween decorations now.”

“Like that arm?” said Bea, pointing to where Lori had dropped it into a bin.

“Yeah. I was gonna grind it down to re-use it but I guess someone saw it next to the door and snuck it out.”

“You let people in here?” said Mae.

“No way!” said Lori. “I mean, one tourist huffs the vapors in here and there’s gonna be a lawsuit!”

“There’s a section of the studio that acts like a foyer where she can interact with customers,” Bea supplied, having put the whole thing together. “They can still watch her work through the windows.”

“The windows that are all blocked up,” said Mae.

“I don’t really like people looking at me through windows,” said Lori.

“It is kind of the point of this entire place,” said Bea. “Local artists working in an open space.”

“Okay. I just don’t like people watching me work.”

Bea pursed her lips. It was hard to argue against that. Between working in a hardware store and working as a janitor, Bea had come to the conclusion that her ideal job was one where she was in a well-lit, windowless room with two chutes in the walls. Paper would come out from one chute, she’d stamp it, then put it into the other chute where it would be whisked away to parts unknown. And not another living thing would enter her field of vision for eight hours. Also she’d have her phone to stay entertained. Sometimes she’d dream about this job instead of her old college dreams.

It wasn’t really her job to enforce the Glass Factory’s vision, she concluded. Her paycheck came from picking up trash.

“Isn’t it hard to take all these commissions so close to Halloween?” she said, changing the subject.

“Yes!” said Lori with feeling. “It sucks. I can barely keep up. But it helps me focus, if that makes sense. Like, everything else kind of falls away when I’ve got deadlines to keep. It’s like… your brain kind of sorts out the things that matter and separates them from the things that don’t so you can concentrate.”

“Wow,” said Mae. “My brain doesn’t do that at _all_.”

Lori looked down. “Yeah. I know. I’m kind of weird.”

“That’s not what I meant,” said Mae. “It’s not weird. It’s good!”

“Um. Thanks.”

The downturn in the atmosphere was like a heavy blanket smothering the room. Either that or the ventilation stopped working and they were all going to asphyxiate on polyurethane fumes. Bea tilted her head to catch the rattle of the ducts. Yup. Imminent death averted. It was just Lori. Mae dipped out of Lori’s field of view and gave Bea a helpless shrug.

“You… said there was a problem with the studio?” Bea said.

Lori looked up again and nodded. “Oh. Yeah. Okay. Um. Yeah. Okay.” She set the box aside. “So. Like. I don’t mean to be a bother or anything, but the masks you guys supplied me with are not the right rating for these chemicals.”

“Okay, that sounds like a major issue,” said Bea. “Should you even be operating the studio?”

“It’s fine! It’s fine! The air circulation is good enough. The masks are just, like, for safety regulations. But I should still really have them.”

“Okay,” said Bea. “I’ll check the manifest and run it by you to make sure it’s accurate. In the meantime I can stop by a hardware store tomorrow and get enough to tide you over until we get the correct stock.”

“That, uh, that sounds good. Yeah.”

“Anything else?”

“I’m like a quarter through the stock of resin.”

Bea’s eyes bulged. “What, _already_? You’ve been here for two days! That was meant to last two weeks!”

“Yeah, well commissions piled up!” Lori shot back. “I can’t help it, okay?” She huffed sharply and her cheeks puffed up and turned red.

“Whoa,” said Mae. “It’s okay. Take deep breaths.”

“I… don’t… need… you… to…” Lori’s voice faded out as she gasped.

“Okay, okay,” said Bea. “Is there anything I can do?”

Lori shot her a glare even as she gulped down more air.

“Bea, patronize,” said Mae.

“I’m not —”

“You’re making it weird!”

“You were doing the same thing!”

“I’m… fine!” said Lori. She regained her composure like she had to wrestle it down, but she managed it. “I’m fine. I just. Get like that sometimes. It’s nothing.”

“Okay,” Bea said cautiously. “We’ve got reserves and we can order more.”

“My financial aid will cover it as educational expenses,” said Lori. “So make sure to give me the receipt.”

“I’m _definitely_ going to get you those masks tomorrow,” Bea said and Lori looked at her, trying to read into her words. The way she sat, rigid and tense in her chair, Bea was half-convinced that Lori could snap her own spine through sheer willpower. “We’ll get everything taken care of.”

“Okay,” Lori said, and her shoulders sagged. “Okay. Sorry. If I’m being weird.”

“You’re not, it’s fine,” said Bea. “Believe me, I deal with way weirder artists.”

“Tell her about the puppets,” said Mae.

“I’m not going to tell her about the puppets,” said Bea.

“It’s a funny story.”

“If you like property destruction.”

“Good news, Bea. I _love_ property destruction.”

They were interrupted when Lori giggled. “You two are funny,” she said.

Mae gave Bea a look as if to say _see?_ Bea rolled her eyes. It was well past time to get on with her actual job. She moved towards the exit.

“I’ll get you taken care of,” she said. “I’ll be back on my shift tomorrow afternoon.”

“Thanks,” said Lori. “Sorry if I’m being—”

“You’re not,” said Bea. “As we have established.”

This got a small smile out of Lori that felt like a victory. “Right. Thanks.”

Mae and Bea walked out of Lori’s studio and returned to the janitor cart.

“Look at you,” Mae said. “All taking charge, solving problems.”

“Giving college students panic attacks, yup, I’m real accomplished,” Bea said.

“Was that a panic attack?”

“I don’t know. Or she’s got a respiratory issue. I’m not a doctor.”

“Hm. Maybe she’s like Angus.”

“Maybe. I figured you’d stay behind,” Bea said. “Look at gross horror stuff.”

“Eh. I can do that later”

“Still got late-night work to do?”

“Oh. Right. Nah, not really. Just wanted to hang with you.”

“Oh,” said Bea. “Okay.”

~~~

Mae waited as Bea clocked out.

“I hope you weren’t expecting to make a night out of this,” said Bea. “Pretty much gonna head home.”

Mae shook her head. “No, dude. I’m not, like, trying to keep you late or something.”

“Oh,” said Bea.

Mae appeared unsure. “That’s cool, right? Like, that’s a thing we do? When we’re cool with each other?”

“I don’t know,” said Bea. It sounded more lost than she had intended it to.

That made Mae almost hiccup with laughter. “Ha ha. Look at us. We’re like complete bozos.”

“God. You’re right,” said Bea.

“Am I bugging you?” 

“No,” Bea said quickly. “Not consistently, at least.”

“So… no? Or?”

“I mean you’re fine, don’t worry about it,” said Bea through gritted teeth. She was coming to the realization that she’d need to recalibrate her sarcasm around Mae until they were both used to each other.

“Good enough!” said Mae.

“Um. Sorry,” said Bea. “I’m not really the most sociable? Or… nicest?”

Mae waved her concern away. “Relax. You can do a lot with ‘good enough,’ you know?”

“Like what?”

“Like… see ya tomorrow?”

Bea smiled. “Heh. Yeah, that can happen.”

“Cool.”

~~~

When Bea stepped through Jackie’s door, Jackie was at the counter eating leftovers.

“What up,” said Jackie. “How was work?”

“Okay. How about you?”

“I’m still alive.”

“You are heard.” Bea slouched towards the bathroom and washed up. Then she returned to the kitchen and made to assemble herself a sandwich. “Do you think it’s possible to interact with other people and not throw up every defensive barrier there is?”

“Gross.”

“I know, but humor me.”

“Worried you might push someone away?” Jackie smiled lopsidedly.

“I am not going to talk about this if you’re going to go therapist on me.”

“Just be yourself, Bea.”

“Seriously?”

“You either get therapist or you get after-school special, I am too zonked out for nuance right now.”

It was kind of late, Bea had to concede. “Fair,” she said. “I don’t even know why I asked the question. Probably still high on fumes.”

Jackie tilted her head. “Girl, what they got you doing there?”

Bea stared at her sandwich, the ragged edge where she had bit through it reminded her of Lori’s prop arm. The mad scientist in a room full of chemicals, windows covered over and horrors on the shelves. She thought of Mae. The ghost that seemed to pop out of the least likely places, ignoring boundaries and sneaking past barriers. What did that make Bea? She thought back to what Mae said.

“I’m just a janitor,” she said. “I’m fighting entropy, Jackie.”

Jackie stopped mid-chew.

“Don’t ever tell anyone I said that,” said Bea.

~~~

The next morning, Bea went shopping.

By now any barrier between work-life and private-life had toppled. Even if she weren’t purchasing supplies for Lori, the majority of Bea’s social circle was now in the place she worked. This would have alarmed the Bea from five years ago. A lot of things Bea was doing now would have alarmed five-years ago Bea.

She told herself that it wasn’t guilt that brought her here. Bea had ordered the masks that Lori listed. It wasn’t _her_ fault. But culpability seemed like a trivial thing to care about when Bea remember Lori taking in those big, frightening breaths as if she were heaving her own lungs out of her body. It just seemed the right thing to do and she had to hope that the Glass Factory would reimburse her. Bea could get pretty obstinate when it came to receipts. They would definitely reimburse her, she decided.

The store was cavernously large with rows of stuff that stretched into the distance. It was a 20-minute bus ride to the edge of Old Harbor to get to this store. There were probably local hardware shops within walking distance that Bea could have used.

She just… didn’t. One of these days she’d probably be able to walk into one of those places without thinking of her own family, but this was not that day. Instead she appreciated the horrid anonymity that came with the big box stores because sometimes you want to go where nobody knows your name.

Eventually she found the masks Lori needed. They were little things in stacked together in plastic bags. Bea considered getting resin too, but hell she wasn’t an artist. It was far too likely she’d mess that one up. Plus no one would appreciate her hauling those buckets onto a city bus.

With the masks bagged and paid for Bea was on a bus again heading towards the Glass Factory. In time she was clocked in and, before she referred to the day’s work orders, she walked to Lori’s studio.

Somehow, it was more crowded than before. Bea pushed through. Someone, apparently learning the lesson of the past few days, had dragged the brass and velvet stanchions from storage and used them to tame the masses into a slightly more orderly line that wrapped around the studio and terminated at the foyer. There were still clusters of people peering into the studio where Lori did her work. Mostly they got a view of craft supplies for their troubles. Bea resolved to at least suggest to Lori that her props might make better window viewing. At least some of the ones less likely to induce nightmares.

As she stood at the studio entrance, she watched a child with their parents, walking happily with their face concealed by the werewolf mask Lori had shown off the night before.

“Hello, Beatrice.”

Bea looked to the side. Director Quelcy was standing away from the crowd under the shade of artificial plants. Deciding this was a summons, Bea walked over.

“Director.”

“It’s quite a sight, isn’t it?”

“I didn’t think it would be this popular,” Bea said.

“I’m surprised too. But at least this time it’s a pleasant surprise. Are you interested in her work as well?”

“Sure. I’m not here for that though.” Bea raised her hand holding the bag full of masks. “I needed to restock her masks.”

“Oh, good. Safety inspectors will be watching this place closely. Good work.”

“Yeah. Uh, so I did buy this with my own money so —”

“Yes, yes. Take the receipt over to Accounting and they will see to it you are fully reimbursed.”

“Oh,” said Bea. She had expected a fight or… something. “Okay. Thanks.”

Quelcy looked at her over her glasses. “You do what you can to make sure this studio stays fully operational, understood? This is becoming quite the success.”

“But it’s not really… art, is it?”

“How do you mean?” said the Director.

“Well… it’s kind of commercial, right? I mean, she makes them to sell.”

“Beactrice, nearly everybody here is making something to sell. This is no different.”

“I suppose. I guess it’s just unexpected to see stuff that’s usually in one of those fly-by-night costume shops.”

“Have you been in Old Harbor long?” Director Quelcy said.

“No, not very. Arrived a few months ago.”

“If you ever find the opportunity, go look around the restaurants and cafes. The local ones, mind you, not the chains. In almost every single one of them you will find a painting or a sculpture or some other such thing that the owner bought from an artist working right here in the Glass Factory. We are as much a part of this community and we produce opportunities for local artists to do business. I’m not one of those people who sniffs at an artist who has found commercial success. Artists deserve to be paid, pure and simple.”

“Makes sense.”

“Hah!” Quelcy’s laugh was brittle and drew the attention of nearby patrons who just as quickly looked away. “I wish it made sense to other people. Sometimes I think everyone assumes we… I don’t know, live off of morning dew and flower nectar. Like creatures from a mythical realm. Start saying that artists need money to survive just like everyone else and people’s eyes start to glaze over.”

_Janitors deserve to survive too,_ Bea thought, though she needed the job too much to say it out loud. “I should get these to Lori,” she said.

“Yes, yes. Good idea. Oh, and Beatrice?”

“Yes?”

“Before you leave for the day, get your name tag fixed.”

“Okay.”

~~~

By the time Bea had gotten face-to-face with Lori, she had the scars to tell the tale. Or at least, she had been elbowed and her feet stepped on several times. This crowd was probably a safety violation of some kind. Lori was there, with a counter between her and a patron. There with the crowd and the walls lined with shelves of masks and props, Lori looked small. But she seemed to be holding up well.

There were moments where Bea could hear Lori’s breath catch and her face went red and she had to force her words out between gasps. No one else seemed aware, and in the hubbub of transactions Lori seemed intent on hiding any distress she was feeling.

Eventually there was a lull and Bea managed to get Lori’s attention. Lori started as if it were the first time she had noticed Bea. Perhaps it was. Bea raised her bag of masks. Lori kept staring.

“Hey, I got your —”

“What size is your face?” said Lori.

“I’m sorry?” Bea started to say, but Lori already turned away from her, rooting through a cabinet on her side of the counter.

Lori resurfaced and slapped a tailor’s tape measure onto the counter top. “Here,” she said. “I need you to measure the vertical circumference of your face.” She turned to face a new customer.

Bea regarded the measuring tape as if it were a snake coiled to strike. “What?”

“Just —” Lori took a deep breath and held. Then she let it out. “I’ll do it. Come here.”

Grabbing one end and flipping her wrist, Lori got the tape up and over Bea’s head and she grabbed the dangling end. She pulled down on them, bringing Bea to her level.

“Ow,” said Bea.

“Sorry,” said Lori. She brought the ends together at Bea’s chin.

“Why are you measuring me?”

“Somebody commissioned a mask and I forgot to take their measurement because I’ve been so swamped and you’re about their size and I have to work with what I have!” Lori said in a rush.

“It’s a Halloween mask,” said Bea. She flinched as Lori whipped the tape around her for another measurement. “It doesn’t have to be perfect.”

“This is experience,” Lori said. “I’m trying to get professional experience here. This is the _world_ I live in.”

Bea looked up at the line outside the studio. Lori tugged at the tape and jerked her head back. Bea looked up moving only her eyes. “Must be… busy.”

“Insanely,” Lori said with a ragged breath. “Okay! I’m done! Thank you for the masks but I’m very busy! Hello, what are you interested in?” The last part was directed at the person across the counter.

Bea backed away into a corner and watched. Lori, for how frail she seemed, was a one-woman whirlwind. She juggled her clients, one browsing a catalog on a heavy-looking, weathered laptop that had been secured to a desk. Another at the counter where Lori took down commissions. A third browsing the shelves. Lori flitted from one to another, moving each one along so that another waiting in line could take their place.

It was a marked difference from the sedate pace that the rest of the studio artists moved in. It was rare that more than half the studios were even occupied and the most Bea had ever seen were maybe five people browsing the exhibits. This was like a Black Friday rush with Lori as the sole worker at the counter.

“Do you… need help?” Bea said

Lori looked towards her distractedly and shook her head vigorously, her hair clinging in spots to her head in sweaty clumps. “I have this. Don’t you have a job too?”

Bea stayed to watch a little longer, then she stood up straight. “Guess I do,” she said and walked out.

~~~

“Doesn’t it seem weird?” Bea said.

“I guess it’s a little weird?” said Angus. He stood up from adjusting his camera and regarded the magnets he had put on the screen. “I think I’m using the wrong strength of magnet here. Neodymium is fiddly, you know?”

“If you say so,” said Bea. “I mean, she’s all alone and there’s a line all around her studio. That can’t be right, can it?”

“I don’t know, Bea. It’s a holiday studio. Those places are always busy, but only for a few days. Especially if they’re making pretty good masks? Like you said?”

“Yeah, they’re pretty good. Better than what you’d get from retail. Handcrafted and all that good shit.”

“There you go. I’d be surprised if she wasn’t swamped. Halloween’s always a good time to get crafty.” Angus brought out a plastic container of magnets and sifted through them.

“Yeah, I know, but…” Bea grimaced as the _clack clack_ of magnets drowned out her words. “She’s alone down there,” she said loudly. “Shouldn’t there be an… assistant or something?”

“Never heard of an assistant,” said Angus. “Then again, I’ve never been in high demand.”

“It just seems wrong for her to take all this on by herself.”

“She sounds very ambitious, Bea. Maybe she wants the challenge.”

Angus put the container away and placed new magnets. Bea peaked over his shoulder. On the screen set into the table, there was an image, a rough illustration. Monochrome figures striding across a flat land against a yellow sky. The details were lost under the distortions of the magnets.

“What are you making there?”

“I found a box of old books that I read when I was a kid,” said Angus. “I thought I’d scan in all the illustrations and, I don’t know, twist them around, see if they look cool or weird? Art is basically somebody wondering if they can make something cool or weird. At least, that’s my experience.”

“Corrupting images of childhood nostalgia, huh?” said Bea with a wry smile. “An expression of a fraught youth, no doubt.”

Angus froze mid-magnet placement. His face was not visible from where Bea was standing, but she got the distinct impression that she had touched a third rail.

“Uh. I mean, who doesn’t have a fraught childhood, right?” said Bea.

Tension flowed out of Angus’ frame. “Yeah,” he said eventually. “Who doesn’t. You know, it’s funny. I didn’t even think that when I started doing this. But yeah, I guess that was a subconscious kind of idea. Art is basically the deep parts of your brain speaking without you noticing. At least, that’s my experience.”

Bea nodded. “Versatile thing, art.”

“Why are you so worried anyway?” said Angus. “About, uh, Lori?”

“I guess she reminds me of me when I was her age,” said Bea. She’d have to share eventually. Being the friend with the mysterious past actually meant being a friend who didn’t fucking talk about themselves at all, and that wasn’t fair. “I was working a job all by myself back home. No support, but all the obligation. Seeing her like that is kind of like seeing a past version of me. You ever want to kick your past self’s ass?”

“Nah, he’s gone through enough shit,” said Angus. “I think I’d give him a hug.”

“You’re a good guy, Angus.”

“So you got away from all that, right?” said Angus.

Bea shrugged. “About as well as one can get away from their family business.”

Both eyebrows bobbed up on Angus’s face, peeking over his glasses. “I see.”

“Yeah. Well. I’m here, aren’t I?” said Bea, a tad sharper than she had intended and now it was Angus touching the third rail.

“Personally, I’m glad that you are.”

Instantly deflating, Bea eased against the studio wall. She felt it give slightly under her weight. “Thanks, Angus.”

“Think nothing of it.”

“So have you got plans for Halloween?” Bea said.

“Working at the vape store.”

“What kind of work do you see there?”

“All sorts of stuff. There’s the usual repairs, people coming in with real basic stuff that they could do if they knew better.”

“Do you teach them?” said Bea.

“That’s the struggle isn’t it? Teach them and they might lose their reason to come back. Don’t and they’ll have to come back, but they’re still clueless about how to maintain this object that is theirs. I always choose to educate though. I like to hope that in the long run it pays off.”

“How so?”

“Well, clients that are more versed in vape maintenance is more likely to be interested in tricking their kit out. Once they’ve been given an education on the fundamentals, anyone can imagine the possibilities. They just need encouragement and a little education.”

“That’s weirdly sweet,” said Bea. “Have your outreach efforts paid off?” 

“A bit. I get repeat customers who want, like, lights on their rig, that kind of thing. One guy’s been bugging me to make like a ringtone? I guess? I mean, you can run a respectable amount of gizmos off of a vape battery so long as you’re mindful. That’s something I had to learn a bit through trial and error. One time I put too much load on a guy’s vape and the battery exploded in his face. Right there in the shop when he gave it a spin.”

“Ouch.”

“It was more light and sound than any injury. And the guy’s friend was recording him so they got a viral video out of it. They were very cool about, you know, not suing me or ruining the shop’s reputation, so it turned out okay. I was lucky. A lot of people out there will take any opportunity to shit on people who work behind a counter.”

“Oh yeah,” said Bea. “Sounds like the worst you got was some guy bugging you for music?”

“Ha ha. He has like this idea about a jingle playing every time he puffs.”

“That sounds really annoying.”

“I’m bound by my principles to promote the growth of creativity in every mind,” Angus said solemnly through a smile. “But yeah, I hope to never meet him outside of a professional capacity. I actually have a set up that would do the job. A little thumb drive with a bootleg MIDI player on it connected to a mini speaker, all of it in a casing. All he’d need to do is load some music into it but he insists it should be, like, an original score.”

“So whip one up. Can’t be what, more than eight notes or something. Anything more would be too much, I think.”

“I’ve got a tin ear for that kind of thing.”

“You were in choir!”

“That doesn’t mean anything. I mean I guess I can carry a tune but I can’t, like, make one. It’s a skill I never picked up.”

“Hm,” said Bea.

“What about you? Halloween plans?”

“From what I’m being told, my plans will involve making sure a kid doesn’t crawl into the kiln while all the studios are open to trick-or-treaters.”

Angus sucked on his teeth. “Condolences.”

“I keep telling myself that I get paid for this, so I guess I should do it. Speaking of…” Bea moved to leave the studio. “About time for me to make my rounds.”

As Angus waved, Bea thought about her laptop and the folder of aimless little music she had made on her step sequencer. Was this a weird thing, that she was thinking about doing? Or was it a friend thing? It would be cool if she knew where the line was on a question like that.

As she wondered this, she diverted herself down towards the supply office where her new name tag was waiting for her. It read “BEAT RICE.”

~~~

Long after the sun set, Bea rolled her shoulders and stretched the ache out of her calves. The end of her shift was like the end of an adrenaline high. Or, at least, it was what she imagined an adrenaline high was _like_. Fatigue caught up to her like weights draped over her shoulders.

After hours, the Glass Factory reminded Bea of a dead mall. The thud of her boots echoed as she made her rounds. Paper chains of Mae’s bats and pumpkins looped from the rails lining the floors above, and many of the artists had their own Halloween decorations for their individual studios. Including one artist Bea had come to recognize as extremely religious. The window for that studio was plastered with religious passages. The maintenance staff had to talk the artist down from posting pamphlets calling Halloween an outright sin. Bea didn’t see the problem. It would make for novelty. She was sure Mae would have gotten a laugh out of it.

Halloween also brought extra hours. Bea had never been in the building this late and it was kind of cool. The quiet, the emptiness. It wasn’t so much that she could do things here and no one would see, but just the novelty of being in a big space with no activity. It was hard to get that in a city without trespassing somewhere. It was kind of secret. She could lie in the middle of the floor and stare up at the ceiling and… it would be cool, somehow. Not like how Mae wanted to flood the place with soap and slide around. That would be a nightmare to clean up. Bea just wanted to… exist in a place that was large and dark and quiet.

Distant footfalls sounded somewhere above her, a reminder that Bea wasn’t actually alone. A few other janitors were finishing their tasks as well. On paper, they were meant to check in with the capital J Janitor before going off, but he never enforced that. They’d all see him anyway when they clocked out on the computer next to his workbench with its tiny television permanently tuned to sports.

The Janitor’s schedule was a mystery to Bea. He wasn’t listed on the maintenance calendar, which might be because he was a supervisor and they have their own schedule? It was the only thing Bea could think of to explain his whole weird deal.

A cold white halogen light splashed across the floor, a light from the restrooms nearest the cafe. Bea frowned. Usually whoever was in charge of cleaning the restrooms up at night would be done by now and the lights switched off. The compulsive frugality Bea had learned over time nagged at her about the wasted electricity. She veered from her course and made for the light.

“Knock, knock,” she said as she came up to the entrance. “Maintenance. Anybody… ah shit.”

She had to admit, she had gotten used to not having to deal with vandalism in the restrooms. It had been a nice break. Maybe life was telling her that nothing lasts forever. The transience of happiness, as illustrated in vandalized urinals. 

Someone had taken black markers to the walls and stalls and written “NUKE OLD HARBOR” in big, jagged letters.

Bea had kind of hoped that if someone was going to write shit on the walls in an art center, they’d at least do it artistically. That was before she realized Mae was responsible for, like, all of the vandalism that went on in the immediate area. And while Bea genuinely felt Mae possessed a talent for expression in her sketches — even if it was a talent that Mae seemed unwilling to acknowledge — that talent did not manifest itself in her typography.

The sound of a long, drawn out sigh. Halogen lights flickering and buzzing overhead. The antiseptic pine smell of urinal cakes. Bea stood there and chewed the inside of her cheek. She was going to have to give Mae a talking to. But first…

“Go on home.”

Bea jumped at the voice. Then settled down. She felt she should be used to the Janitor just being there like that. At this point any surprise was frankly beneath her and furthermore —

“I’ll get this cleaned up nice and tidy,” said the Janitor.

Bea looked at him askance. “You sure? It’s kind of late.

“Ain’t no rest for the wicked. Haw!” He slapped his knee and smiled behind his wiry goatee. 

“Um. Okay.” Bea tried to divine some hidden meaning in his words and his expression. Some kind of “Help I’m being exploited by unfair labor practices that are keeping me here far, far past my work hours and I’m speaking to you in code,” kind of deal. She wasn’t exactly adept in reading body language, though.

So she shrugged. “If you say so.” She could have left it at that, but Bea felt a bit guilty for leaving him there even if she couldn’t point to any specific reason why that was. So she felt compelled to offer some solace. “I’ll have a talk with M — some people. Maybe they’re behind it.” Half of Bea was telling her she was over-promising. The other half told her she was babbling. Then another, detached part of her told her that no aspect of her felt she needed to keep going down this road _and yet she did anyway_.

The Janitor only pursed his lips. There was a twinkle in his eye. “Oh yeah? Know some shady folks, do you? And here I thought you were a good’un! Haw haw! That’s okay though, we all need to be a little bad. You go do what you like. I’ll have this right as rain for the morning.” He clapped her roughly on the shoulder and pushed past with a bucket that contained several spray bottles.

Bea left as he propped the bucket under a faucet and let it run. He was a grown man, surely he knew what he was about.

By the time she got to Jackie’s, all thought about the enigma that was the Janitor or confronting Mae had been shoved aside for the promise of a soft couch at the end of a day’s work. She put her work stuff, along with her BEAT RICE name tag, aside and prepared herself for sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay! End of the year. I wanted to get one last chapter out before 2019.
> 
> I've been working on this story for a year. Thank you to everyone who is still sticking it out with me and coming back to read this. It means a great deal and I appreciate your patience.
> 
> The art that Angus is manipulating is [Treasure Island](http://collections.brandywine.org/objects/6235/treasure-island-endpaper-illustration?ctx=27318a52-fd31-42c1-bffd-3d556f568ca5&idx=16) by NC Wyeth.
> 
> [tumblr](https://eldritchgarboandcosmicmalloy.tumblr.com)


	11. Pirates of Old Harbor

“So you see the problem here, right?”

Mae looked at Bea, looked at the restroom walls, then looked at Bea again.

“Uh, the toilet paper is too rough?” she said. “I’ve been meaning to bring that up.”

“The walls, Mae. The walls.”

“Wait, you think _I_ wrote that crap?”

“You literally confessed to regularly vandalizing the restrooms.”

“Yeah! I owned up to it! Which is why you should believe me now when I’m denying that I did this!”

“That’s not the soundest line of reasoning.”

“It is!”

The Janitor was in the process of cleaning up the restroom. According to him, it really required some serious elbow grease and he was completing the job in fits and starts between frequent breaks.

“I mean, it’s not even my handwriting,” said Mae.

“You could have written it blocky to hide your writing style,” Bea said with more conviction than she actually felt. One thing Mae had not impressed upon her was a knack for subterfuge. Mae, for her part, rolled her eyes.

Mae crossed over to the row of sinks and pointed at a long scratch that ran down the length of one of the mirrors. Bea had not seen that before. “Now see, this? This I did.” 

Bea groaned. “Why do you do these things.”

“My mind was kind of wandering at the time.”

“I mean this is actually kind of worse,” said Bea. “You keyed a mirror and it’s not like we can scrub that out.”

“Oh, come on. It’s, you know, whatever. So what?”

“Mae, I don’t know how to explain that you shouldn’t just destroy shit that isn’t yours.”

“It’s just stuff! It’s not like I’m doing murders.”

“No, but you are making my job a lot more difficult than it should be.”

This seemed to give Mae pause. She returned to Bea’s side and pressed her fist to the underside of her chin in thought. “I guess,” she said.

“Well, I mean —”

“Excuse me.”

Bea and Mae turned to the voice behind them. It belonged to a tourist. Only a tourist to Old Harbor would ever wear one of those “I’d Rather Be In Old Harbor” shirts which Bea had always thought of us a weird inferiority complex given form in screen-printed cotton. Like, the statement was farcical on the face of it. Nobody would rather be in Old Harbor. Not when an actual, proper city was right across the river. Tourists didn’t come to Old Harbor unless they didn’t have the money for Bright Harbor or if they needed to burn a few hours before going back home. IRBIOH shirts had layers of meaning and significance attached to economic realities that was probably worth a student paper.

“Can I squeeze by?” said the tourist.

“Yes. Excuse us. Come on, Mae.” Bea gestured outside and Mae followed.

They lingered near the cafe, in a corner away from foot traffic.

“So, like, yeah I didn’t write on your wall,” said Mae.

“I suppose. I mean, it was spelled correctly and everything.”

“Thanks,” Mae said with a sour expression. “Hey, if you really want to catch who did it, we should, like, do a stake out!”

“Yes, Mae, because they’re going to come right back once we clean this place up.”

“I dunno, they might? I need to clear my name and shit.”

“It’s been cleared. You’ve sufficiently convinced me that your apathy is too great for such involved vandalism. You don’t need to make this a thing.”

“It’s a thing, Bea. We have turned this into a thing. We’re going to catch this dastardly wall writer and persecute them to the fullest extent of bathroom wall law.”

“Okay, you are clearly in your own world at the moment, so I’m going back to work. And the word you’re looking for is ‘prosecute,’ there.”

“Precosecute. So, did you have to clean all that stuff up yourself?”

“No, Mae. I just got here. Someone else worked on it all night.”

“Oh, was it that old guy?”

“Yeah.”

“With, like, the awesome nose hair?”

“Y— what?”

“It’s like a hundred spider legs poking out of each nostril.”

“Well. I guess that image is in my head now. Look, Mae, I have a job to do. Don’t you?” Bea asked the question in a moment of annoyance. She didn’t _care_ , exactly, but as soon as she said it, she became curious.

“Sure,” Mae said with a shrug. “I guess I could do that.”

_Must be nice_ , Bea thought as she left.

~~~

“Easy now,” said the Janitor.

Bea grunted as she braced and pushed the hand cart. Two buckets of polyurethane was heavy stuff.

“She’s really burning through the stuff, huh?” said the Janitor.

“Yeah,” said Bea. She was in storage and the Janitor was there because it was regulation that nobody go into storage alone after an unfortunate incident involving a lone overnight security guard and an unsecured two-story high pile of bulk paper towel rolls.

She was having a hard time holding a conversation with him, because every time she looked at his face she imagined spiders living in his nose.

“Does good work, though,” said the Janitor.

“What kind of mask would you want her to make?”

“Scary clown,” said the Janitor.

Bea raised an eyebrow. “Really?”

“Always liked a good scary clown,” said the Janitor. “You?”

“I haven’t really thought of it,” said Bea, and it surprised her to realize this was true.

She kicked the hand cart up onto its wheels and pushed. The Janitor walked beside her, his thumbs in his belt loops as he ambled.

“You got that?” he said.

“I’m fine. If you can get the door that’d be cool.”

“Right. Once I’ve locked up here I’m getting back to that restroom. You ever corner that criminal mastermind of yours?”

That earned a wince from Bea. She strongly suspected that the Janitor had already known she had accused the wrong usual suspect. “Nothing really came of it.”

“Well, I’m sure you’ll sleuth out the culprit. Haw haw! Like in the cartoons!”

Making a face that he could not see as he stayed behind to lock the storage doors, Bea pushed the hand cart towards the elevator.

Once the door slid shut behind her, Bea pulled out her phone and opened Mae’s contact.

**We’re doing the stakeout**

She sent the text, pocketed her phone, and pushed the cart out onto the main floor once the doors opened.

~~~

When Bea came to Lori’s studio, it was, shockingly, not being mobbed. The entrance was locked and a sign hung up saying Lori was out on break. Bea fished out her keys. She sure as hell wasn’t going to haul this stuff back to storage, and leaving them out next to the studio door like they were undelivered packages was a huge no-no. Or at least it should be. Bea didn’t actually check but she was sure she was on solid ground there as far as unattended chemicals go.

Just as she wheeled the cart around the counter, the door to the back room swung open and Lori, eyes narrowed into a sharp glare behind her goggles, poked her head out from the workshop.

“Can’t you read the — oh. Hi.” Her words were muffled by the mask that Bea had gotten for her.

“Hi,” said Bea. “Sorry for dropping in unannounced but I got you some stuff to tide you over until the proper shipment comes in.” She drummed her fingers on the lid of the top bucket.

Lori looked down and then nodded. “Oh. Okay. Good. Um. You can come in.” She retreated and held the door open.

Even with the roaring fan and ventilation, the chemical smell hit Bea like a wall.

“You should, uh, wear those.” Lori gestured vaguely to spare goggles and masks hanging from nails embedded into the studio walls.

“Right.”

Halloween masks dominated the shelves, moreso than the body parts that Bea had seen initially. Each one had little post-it notes on their foreheads with a name and a phone number.

“Set those over, I guess… by the workbench,” Lori said.

“Are these your commissions?” Bea nodded towards the mask as she set the cart down.

“Yeah. They should pick them up, like, tomorrow. And if they don’t, I don’t know. Keep it?”

“You get paid in advance?”

Lori nodded. “I’ve heard too many stories of people getting burned not to. If someone doesn’t like it they can walk away. All this stuff is paid for with student loans, you know? Gonna have that chain wrapped around my neck for like 20 years probably because I live in a hellworld.”

“Didn’t know student loans cover hardware,” Bea said with a murmur. Half of this stuff could’ve come from her family’s store.

“I had to negotiate it,” said Lori. “But I still have to pay for classes on top of that, so it’s not like I got away with anything, just gonna take longer to finish my program. It’s, uh, stressful, but whatever. Hellworld.”

“Hellworld,” said Bea, and it was like some kind of weird handshake between them. Mutual acknowledgment that broke through some a barrier and undid the generalized tension that seemed to follow Lori around. It was slight, and maybe Bea was just imagining it, but Lori seemed to relax.

“Did I interrupt your break?” Bea said.

“No. I mean. I was working.” Lori pulled a mold from where it had been left to dry. “Some guy wanted, like, a robot face. Not really my area? So it’s been a learning experience. Which, uh, is my way of saying I’m screwing up and throwing out a lot of failed projects. So. That’s bad and terrible. I guess I should probably stop before I asphyxiate or whatever.”

“Yeah that sounds like it might be a good idea. Why don’t you get out of the workshop?”

“But then I’m sitting at the counter and there’s no curtains and people can just, like, see me.” Lori said. “I hate that.”

“You hate being looked at?”

“I mean, yeah. In general, yeah. But mostly when I’m out at the counter people expect me to be available to take commissions. I really hate that.”

“I felt the same way when I was working back home,” said Bea. “Sometimes I just hid under the cash register to eat.”

Lori’s eyes brightened behind her goggles. “Ha ha! Yeah! I’ve actually done that. It’s cool because it’s like… kind of a pillow fort situation. Just need some blankets. Ha.” She let out a sigh like a ragged breath that alarmed Bea.

“You should probably get out anyway. Get some air. Being in here for hours can’t be good for you.”

“I’m fine,” Lori said with a wave of her hand.

“Well, okay,” said Bea. “So… robot mask, you said?”

“It sucks so much. I mean, there are, like, right angles and stuff on it. Usually I work with more organic designs. Eyeballs and blood vessels and stuff. And all my masks are soft so straight lines don’t really work. I shouldn’t have taken the commission. I mean. Whatever. I’ll get it, it just sucks.”

“Mm,” said Bea. “And there’s no way to make the mask?”

“I’m sure there is.” Lori slumped in her chair. “I wish I had, like, a 3D printer. That would solve the problem real easy. But if I had 3D printer money I wouldn’t be here, so that’s dumb. I’ve got, like, a thousand ideas what I could do with one. There’s this freeware program that you can design printable 3D models? And I’ve been messing around with that in my free time.”

“You have free time?”

“Ha ha. Yeah. Not so much.”

“Still, it’s pretty impressive.”

“Thanks! Yeah. I love practical effects, but you got to know computers too. Have you ever noticed how, like, computer hackers kind of fucking suck?”

Bea tilted her head. “Haven’t put a lot of thought into that. You mean like in general?”

Lori nodded. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. Like, you see them in television shows and video games and movies and they’re always, like, cool people who hack corporate secrets or wipe out bank debts for poor people and that kind of thing. Or when a CEO is giving a speech in front of a crowd and there’s a big screen behind them, the hacker hijacks the screen and makes it play a recording of the CEO’s crimes.”

“It’s good when that happens,” said Bea.

“Yeah, totally. But, like, hackers in real life aren’t like that. Mostly they’re bad gross weird dudes who steal identities or try to find the addresses of women who make them mad and then post the info online, you know?”

“It’s true, they do that.”

“Sucks is all. I wish we had good hackers. The fact that debts aren’t wiped out by hackers daily in the real world is basically proof that the world is bad.”

“Well, hellworld,” said Bea.

“Hellworld,” said Lori. “I just wish people could _see_ that it is. Like, like, you know that restroom that got all marked up? Like, people should see it like that!”

“People do,” said Bea. “Then people like me have to waste their time cleaning it up.”

“Oh.” Lori’s voice was small and she slouched into her seat. She fidgeted, her hands pressed together. “I thought… I mean… I overheard that whoever did it used, uh, like, permanent marker.”

“There’s no such thing,” said Bea. “With the right chemicals and the right amount of effort you can pretty much wipe anything clean.”

“Makes sense,” said Lori. She cleared her throat and coughed. “So, uh, okay. Okay, uh… thanks for the stuff. I should get back to work.”

“Try to take it easy,” Bea said. It was hard to tell with the goggles, but Lori’s eyes seemed… tired.

Lori huffed, her mask expanding slightly from her exhaled breath. “I’m f-fine. I can handle this.”

“Okay, alright.” Bea stood up. Her legs ached, and it felt like they were getting worse with each passing day on the job. “I’ll lock up behind me. See you around.”

“Y-yeah! Late! Uh, later!”

When Bea exited the studio and turned the lock, she saw the Janitor walking back into the vandalized restroom, whistling and tossing a bottle of cleaning solution from one hand to the other.

~~~

It was the end of the work day. For the most part Bea could wave off her aches and pains and needs over the course of her shift but with a quarter of an hour left before she was off the clock, she was coming to realize she was _really_ hungry. A peanut butter sandwich doesn’t really cover a full shift. Usually she could coast on that and water, but she had been putting in more hours.

She wasn’t about to keel over, it just sucked. She could maybe raid a vending machine. She had a budget. Spreadsheet, crumpled receipts and everything. It all told her she was losing money, but if she tightened every belt the bleed would be a trickle. Maybe it could be raining, or really cold, and that would keep her mind off her stomach.

Bea punched her employee number into the wall-mounted keypad in the toolshed. It blinked a green LED at her and she felt a little of the day’s tension fall away.

“Another day another dollar, right?” said the Janitor.

“An idea of a dollar, anyway,” said Bea. “Floating out there, somewhere.”

The Janitor nodded. “Sometimes I hear folks wonder why you kids are so cynical. I imagine those folks don’t get out in the world much.”

“It’s not all bad,” said Bea. “We have the internet now, so if I ever want to see someone put a rotisserie chicken into a hydraulic press machine to see what happens, then I can do that. So that’s a substitute for progress. Have a good night.”

They waved at each other and Bea left to ascend to ground level. When she did, Mae was there at the cafe, sitting at an empty table and looking in the direction of the employee entrance. She immediately stood up and jogged over.

“Were you… waiting there?” Bea said.

“Yeah dude, I tried to text you back, but you don’t answer your texts because you’re a professional pro who thinks looking at her phone even once while on the clock is, like, a crime.”

“Text back? Oh… right.” Bea had forgotten about the text she had sent off to Mae. It was kind of embarrassing, now that she had several hours between then and now. It felt kind of childish.

“Anyway, it’s so awesome we’re gonna do a stakeout!” said Mae. “I’ve already got the best places to hide mapped out! We should get, like, camouflage? Wear camouflage?

“Hey, let’s not go overboard I just meant… uh… I mean, I guess we can hang out but…”

“No, it’s cool, I know you’re gonna be tired and shit. We can just hide and do you have binoculars? Or radios?”

“Mae, could we sleep on this? It’s the end of the day and I’m hungry.”

“Oh yeah, I could eat.” Mae fell in behind Bea.

“Are… you… what are you doing?”

“Aren’t we gonna eat?”

“I wasn’t… planning on eating out.”

“I’ll pay! I just got paid. With money! Sometimes people tip. You know, only sometimes.”

“What?” said Bea.

“Look, Germ’s about to pull up like a block from the wharf. We can get Wart Dogs. My treat.”

Bea pursed her lips. It was a tempting offer and it was kind of charming how Mae was eager about this. But she wasn’t about the charity. “Look, you get the dogs, I’ll get the drinks.”

“That works.”

~~~

“Hot warts.”

“Dog warts.”

“Ooh, that one’s nice,” said Mae.

“We’re not looking for nice,” said Bea. “We’re trying to come up with the worst possible name for food that already has an awful name. Wart… hogs. I mean, it’s pork.”

“Hog warts.”

“That’s a lawsuit.”

Directly across the street from the Glass Factory was a three-story parking deck. The narrow road between the monolithic former factory and the blocky cement parking deck acted as a wind tunnel that formed a strong current that picked at loose hair and clothes. Bea followed Mae to their illegal hot dog dealer and saw something on Mae’s wrist as Mae raised her arm to shield her eyes against the wind.

“What you got there?” said Bea.

Mae turned her hand around to see what Bea was looking at. “Oh. It’s a tattoo.”

“Oh,” said Bea. “Okay.”

They walked. A crushed paper cup skittered across their path.

“Okay?” said Mae.

“Yeah?”

“I mean, you’re not going to ask me about the tattoo or what it, like, means?”

“I don’t want to be the kind of person who asks everyone with a tattoo what their tattoo means.”

“Aren’t you curious?”

“A bit? Yeah.”

“Because you can ask if you’re curious. We’re cool to do that.”

“I’ve got your permission?” Bea said with a small, wry, smile.

“Agh, whatever! Just ask!”

“What’s the tattoo for, Mae?”

Mae held up her wrist for Bea to see, which did not help much at night. She caught an impression of a man holding something aloft in one hand.

“So, this guy?” Mae said, “Dohr? He’s like, this historical dude who killed a king.”

“Oh, that’s a head. I see it now. I guess that’s cool. It would make a good album cover.”

“No — I mean, yes, that’s true, but there’s more than that.”

“He killed multiple kings?”

“No, just one king. I mean he, like, he was like insulted by the king, right? And so he killed the king.”

“Huh.”

Mae groaned and rolled her eyes. “I’m explaining it all shitty. This king was walking through Dohr’s town and when Dohr didn’t bow to him and say all the shit people expect you to say to kings, the king insulted him and everyone and everything that was basically Dohr’s tiny piece of the world. So Dohr killed him. And it’s like… for somebody who had so much, it wasn’t enough. The king also needed his boot licked too on top of all his wealth and power. Somebody who looks at other people and think that those people are inferior or whatever are never satisfied. They’re always gonna look for any opportunity to win some kind of contest that’s only going on in their own heads. And, like, take every bit of dignity they can from everyone around them. But it’s all fake, and they can only take what those other people are willing to give up, because it’s just easier or they’ve been bullied so much that they think that’s the way the world works. And if they really wanted to they could stand up and cut the head off every bigoted and entitled asshole that tries to step on them. So this is, like, a reminder that it’s all fake, and I don’t have to give anyone a piece of myself, and if they demand it then I can always cut their head off. Or. Say ‘no’. Or whatever. You know.”

“That’s… actually not bad,” said Bea.

“Thanks.”

“It’s easy to say that people can just rise up though. You’re not exactly firebombing mansions, I’ve noticed.”

“I guess,” said Mae. “Maybe it is that easy and we forgot how. Or we’re afraid. Or we think we’re alone. I think it would be cool to firebomb a mansion.”

“Breaking stuff is important to you, isn’t it?” said Bea.

Mae made a face. “I guess? That’s kind of a weird way to say it. It’s not like my religion or anything. I don’t think ‘break shit’ is a core value. Although maybe it could be. Maybe ‘break shit that’s broken’ would work.”

“Isn’t that redundant?”

“Maybe there’s shit out there that’s broken, but nobody sees it, or they pretend not to see it. Like it’s not obvious. I think in that case, you need to be able to show everyone that shit is broken.”

“We’re like, five more conversations away from you writing manifestos in a shed in the woods and it feels like I have a moral obligation to stop.”

“Don’t worry Bea, I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t be, like, legally responsible. Oh, but that does remind me, me and Gregg have this abandoned warehouse we know about. Further down the riverside. We break shit there.”

“Now see, you tell me that this isn’t a religion but then you say you have a building dedicated to this activity that forms a central thesis to your belief system.”

“You should come with us!” said Mae.

“Mm, not fond of tetanus. I’ll pass. Thank you though.”

“I’m always around the place where you work,” said Mae. “What if I showed you my job?”

“Don’t you run around and do deliveries?”

“Yeah, so it’d be like us walking, except I stop at a door every now and then.”

Bea tilted her head. “I mean. As long as I’m not being a pack mule.”

“Naw. Then I’d have to share my tips.”

“Hah. Okay.”

They came up to the Wharton food truck, its engine idling and the faint smell of hot dog carried on the wind. It picked at Bea’s hunger in a way she did not expect of hot dogs. They fell into a longer line than Bea had anticipated, though they made it to the front in short order. Speed was apparently a virtue for the Whartons.

“Hey Germ!” said Mae.

“Hey… Jeremy,” said Bea.

“Just Germ,” said Germ. “Germ Warfare.” blinking at the two women as he stood at the serving window, Germ was a gnomic pillar of tranquility in contrast to his family who rocked the truck on its wheels as they ricocheted from one end to the next, assembling food.

“Right. Germ.” Bea said.

“Thanks, Beat Rice.”

“Just… just Bea,” said Bea as she quickly unpinned and pocketed the name tag she had forgotten.

Germ nodded in a deliberate motion. “Hi Mae, hi Bea. What’s good?”

“Nothing, dude,” Mae said. “What about you?”

Tilting his head, Germ licked his lips thoughtfully. “CBD dogs. Hot new product. Trendy”

“What,” said Bea.

“Whoa, seriously?” said Mae. “Are they any good?”

“No. We just mix the stuff into the relish.”

“Does it get you high?”

“Not really,” said Germ. “They just kind of taste weird and smell funny. But people pay three times the price of a regular dog.”

“I’d say you need a permit, but you already don’t have a food permit,” Bea said.

“Or a vendor permit,” said Germ. “That makes us quadruple illegal. The CBD permit counts as two crimes, probably.”

“How do you even keep your truck from getting impounded?” said Bea.

Germ looked at her. He had big eyes that had a way of locking people into an unconscious staring contest. Bea had to blink rapidly to break away.

“We know all the secrets,” Germ said. “My family worked the docks for a long time. A loooooong time. My family is pretty big and everyone worked the docks. Back in the day, people around here used to call the docks ‘Wharton’s Wharf’. It wasn’t official or anything, but every shipping company had a Wharton working for them. So we know all the places where you can hide in Old Harbor. A few places in Bright Harbor too. No cop can catch us.”

“They used to be badass smugglers,” said Mae. “Or at least, that’s what Germ says.”

“I have pirate blood in me,” said Germ

“Damn right!” said a booming voice behind Germ. One of his brothers or uncles or whatever leaned against the counter, looming over Germ. “Only now we smuggle hot dogs. So what can we get you? Hate to rush friends of the little man, but he needs to work.” He ruffled Germ’s hair.

Germ batted him away. “Back off, I don’t want to smell like hot dog.”

“Too late for that! Ha ha ha!” The man retreated from the counter.

“Sometimes it sucks hard to work for family,” Germ said.

“I know that feeling,” Bea said emphatically. “Do you have a choice, at least?”

“Sure,” said Germ. “I work a bunch of odd jobs. I only come back here when I have to fall back on something.”

“Hm,” said Bea.

“So, okay, I guess we’re gonna take two normal dogs, not whatever weird weed dog you’re selling. All the fixings? Bea? Okay, yeah, all the fixings.”

“And two drinks,” said Bea. “Fiascolas.”

“Make mine Lime,” said Mae.

They pooled their cash together and paid. While their food was being prepared, Bea mulled some ideas over. It really wasn’t her place to interfere and she wondered if she was acting condescending by even considering it. Then the image of Lori, stooped over a mold during her break or talking to a long line of customers through labored breaths came back to her. It was at least worth asking a question. Bea could suggest the idea to Lori and hope she didn’t get too angry about it. The stubborn glint in Lori’s eye was far too recognizable. The look of a person who’d break their own body in half rather than ask for help.

Two paper baskets with hot dogs swaddled in napkins and steaming in the night’s cold soon crossed over the counter, followed by drinks. As Bea grabbed her meal, she looked at Germ.

“Do you want to work for someone who makes Halloween masks?” she said.

Germ tilted his head and looked at her, eyes locking again.

“That sounds badass,” he whispered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [tumblr](https://eldritchgarboandcosmicmalloy.tumblr.com)


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